Rodney Stevens

The owners of Maclean business Blueberries Smoothies and Health Bar will be celebrating this week when scaffolding at the front of their River Street premises is removed after 2 years of severely impacting their trade.

The scaffolding in front of the Heritage Listed shopfronts was erected as Council identified the fascia was threatening to collapse, so a long process began to get engineering reports and the multiple shop owners to agree on the work to carefully conserve the heritage values of the façade.

When Adrian and Michele Giffin moved from a smaller premises into the former Skye Café in February 2022, five months before the scaffolding was erected, they initially doubled their takings.

After the scaffolding went up in August 2022, they estimate takings fell by up to 75 per-cent.

“Just by the scaffolding blocking it off, a lot of people would go past but it looked like that section of the street was closed,” Michele said.

“We were quite hidden behind it, and if you weren’t a local you didn’t know that we were open, even some locals thought we were closed, after a couple of months locals came along and said, ‘oh you’re open again’ and I said, ‘we’ve been open all along’.

“We put it out on social media that we were there, and this is what we were doing, but a lot of people don’t have social media.

“We’d only been in the new, bigger shop for five months and it should have been the time that things really started taking off in great leaps and bounds, but it impacted a fair bit there…it has been really hard, it’s been quite a struggle.

“Adrian did some calculations, and we were probably down 75 per-cent of what we should have been doing, and we’d just come though Covid which also impacted us quite a bit.”

The couple said if it wasn’t for loyal locals and the word spreading about their business among travellers, they wouldn’t have survived the past two years.

“We’ve been lucky, we’ve had some really good loyal customers,” Michele said.

“If it wasn’t for the locals, we could have gone down big time,” Adrian said.

“Just the other week some people who were staying in Yamba came in and they were told by people in Victoria, if you’re going through, go to Blueberry’s, it’s a great little café…we’ve always had customers who might live in Brisbane or Sydney and if they’re travelling through they always say they always want to drop into Maclean cause it’s a lovely town.”

“We haven’t laid any staff off through all of this we have kept all of the staff we had, so Michele and I have more or less taken the hit,” Adrian said.

Through these testing times, their commitment to the community hasn’t waned, sponsoring The Lower Clarence Magpies, the Magpies Old Boys, and the Lower Clarence Netball Association.

Now the work is complete, the couple said they are looking forward to a new dawn for their business, in a beautiful heritage building.

They said initially Campbells Construction Co and now Jeremy from Angourie Constructions had been very accommodating during challenging times throughout the process, working on Saturdays to limit the impact to businesses and their landlords were very supportive.

“It will be revamped with the new awning that is going back up which will look fantastic, the old awning didn’t have any posts holding it up and they’ve gone back to the heritage style with posts,” Adrian said.

“It will bring back the old style to the building and it will look really good,” Michele said.

“It’s a revamp for the building and a new dawn for Blueberry’s,” Adrian said.

Work is also being done at the rear of the Clarence Canegrowers Association premises on Centenary Drive to upgrade the building.