A thousand photos on a phone. A box of VHS tapes in the loft. A wedding album that never got made. Simon Hepburn has heard all of it - and his answer is always the same: come in, we'll sort it.
Share Your Story, the creative hub Hepburn opened on George Street last spring, marks its first birthday this month. Twelve months in, the idea has found its feet - and so has the space itself.
"We've shown a steady uptick," says Simon, 53. "There are things that have gone really well, and things we needed to think about again."
The most visible change is a new partition at the back of the unit - now a fully soundproofed and lightproofed studio, sealed off from the shop floor.
"As we got busier, we were less able to use the space for anything involving sound," Simon explains. The studio now handles podcasts, corporate videos, headshots, family portraits and, memorably, a recorded eulogy that was sent to a funeral service in Texas. "We're right in the middle of Altrincham," he adds. "You don't have to go to the Northern Quarter or some industrial estate to find us."
So what, exactly, is Share Your Story? It's a question Simon has got better at answering.
"Everyone has something they want to share," he says. "It could be the story of your life, or a family member's. It could be a business trying to explain why it's different, or a charity trying to get its message out." The solutions vary - a camera, a microphone, a journal, a photo book, a converted VHS tape - but the starting point is always the same: someone with a story and no clear way to tell it.
"People are either technology-poor - they can't convert a tape or create a photo book - or they're time-poor," Simon says. "'I've got a thousand pictures on my phone. Help.' That's genuinely what people say when they walk in."
The shop stocks carefully curated brands - Røde microphones, Canon, Kodak, Fujifilm, Manfrotto - and has deliberately avoided the race to the bottom. "People come in saying they've bought three tripods on Temu and they've all fallen apart," he says. Alongside the cameras and audio gear, there’s a growing range of journals, memory books and scrapbooking materials. Film photography, Simon notes, is "really, really popular in Altrincham".
Running the shop is a team of six, each with their own specialism. Sam leads on film photography and now does shoots - kids, dogs, business headshots. Finlay handles audio and produces the store's social media videos. Maya designs the in-house magazine and newsletter. Jon looks after community links, networking and distributing their Shared Stories magazine around the area. "Everyone has a technical specialist role as well as being able to sell things in the shop," Simon says. The fact that all six are still here a year on is something he's very proud of.
Year two, he says, is less about building and more about following through. He hopes to see more of the many people who have been in, expressed an interest and said they’d return. "The most frustrating thing is people saying, 'I'm going to come back and do something,' and then disappearing," Simon admits. He suspects most of them are still sat with their unfinished projects. "More and more people are coming back."
There's also a partnership in the works with Altrincham Boys' Grammar and its trust, bringing the space's creative workshops into schools - something Simon, as a former teacher, is particularly energised by.
Ask him what Share Your Story is, and he'll tell you: a creative hub, and a shop. In that order.
"Come here to be creative - through video, audio, writing, photography - with the aim of telling your story," he says. "A lot of that involves having the products that enable you to do it. Which makes it a shop. But it's the hub first."
Share Your Story, 85 George St, Altrincham WA14 1RN
