On her retirement a few months ago, Gillian Farge received a chaise longue.

She is yet to touch it. Gardening, Pilates, pickleball and travelling have kept her on the go.

It has been a slow transition from her role as the head of Island Trading, the home furniture store she started 40 years ago. In 2013 she handed the reins over to her daughter, Laura Farge-Lowe, but kept her hands in the business.

“When Covid-19 came a few staff left the island,” the 77-year-old said. “When we were back to full strength and had a really good team, I thought, if I don’t retire now I might never.”

Despite that, it is not unusual even today for her to suddenly appear in the shop and start washing the windows.

“I was always very hands-on,” Mrs Farge said. “Having a business is like bringing up a child but I am at an age when I’m slowly slowing down. I want to do other things.”

She started the store only because the company her husband, Roger, was running “went into Chapter 11, halfway towards bankruptcy”.

With two little girls to care for, she started looking for other revenue streams. Her friends were closing their pool cleaning supply business so she bought out their stock of chemicals, protective gloves and rain gear.

“I started calling small hotels on the island,” Mrs Farge said. “My prices were reasonable and I promised to deliver.”

Her daughters sat in the back of the car while she drove around to customers and did well enough that she was able to buy more merchandise.

Mrs Farge opened Island Trading at the top of Spurling Hill on Reid Street, across the road from where it is now.

She was an oddity in the early 1980s, when few women owned businesses.

“There were a few ladies who ran dress shops but none selling the kind of thing I was selling.”

Looking back, she regrets not giving the store a fancier name.

“It seemed to describe the business at the beginning and then it was hard to change these things once we were established,” she said.

Spurling, the mannequin, has been a constant. He sits outside no matter what the weather dressed in reflective rain gear, and has had several misadventures.

“We left him in the courtyard overnight a couple of times,” Mrs Farge said. “It started to rain so someone scaled the fence and stole his raincoat.”

Another coat was stolen in broad daylight. The person was in such a hurry they took one of Spurling’s arms with them.

“They were obviously desperate,” she said. “We had to stuff the sleeve of the next suit we put on him with newspaper to give him the appearance of an arm.”

She got ahead by listening to her customers. It was a tourist who suggested she offer outdoor furniture along with the “lovely swimming pool products” she was focused on selling at the time.

“He was a sales manager for a company called Gloster,” she said. “They are now quite a stylish company. In the early Eighties, though, the furniture was very basic.”

He convinced her to buy a couple of tables and a long relationship was forged.

“They say I am their oldest customer now,” Mrs Farge laughed. “I’m not sure how I feel about the use of the word ‘old’.”

Retail was something that came naturally to her. She grew up in an apartment above her mother Edith Bowden’s hat shop in Manchester, England.

“To get to my bedroom, I had to walk through the store,” Mrs Farge said.

By the age of 10 or 11, she was ringing up orders, checking invoices and writing cheques that she then had to pass to her father, Benjamin Lloyd, to sign.

“It was more enjoyable than doing homework,” she said.

When her mother later opened a shoe store, Mrs Farge helped there too.

“Then I left retail for a time,” she said.

She studied business at the University of Salford and then worked in the hotel industry in London.

In 1975 she relocated to Bermuda to work as a personal assistant to the president of the Princess Hotels.

She met her husband at the Bermuda Sub Aqua Club and they married in 1979.

As Island Trading developed, she travelled to trade shows around the world to select furniture that would stand up against Bermuda’s humid, salty climate.

Her secret weapon was a magnet that she surreptitiously held near the furniture to see if it had any metal in it.

“If it did then I knew it would rust,” she said. “I stayed away from it.”

She then got a great deal of joy out of seeing the items on the shop floor.

“It was even better when a customer bought it and they were happy.”

Now that she is retired, she is looking forward to getting involved with a few charities, and spending more time with her four grandchildren, two of whom live in Switzerland, with her daughter, Emma.

• Lifestyle profiles the island’s senior citizens every week. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com, with the full name and contact details and the reason you are suggesting them