The famous Cardiff fancy dress shop Script to Screen is being sold after 25 years of providing costumes to consumers, film studios, TV shows and West End productions.
The current owners, Lindsay Wood and Chrissie Pegg, have built up a collection of between 50,000 and 100,000 outfits in their Cardiff-based costume haven which dates back to 1993.
But the current owners of Script to Screen are planning on stepping down from the business and they are looking for someone to take over and keep their dress-up collection – which includes costumes from Les Miserables, Calamity Jane, Return to Treasure Island and Robin of Sherwood – from being split up, even if that means moving it to a new location
“We want it to go as a business [rather than splitting the collection up] because so many people – not just in Wales but all over the country – depend on us supplying them,” said Lindsay. “We deal with loads of schools who’ve got big budgets these days. We worked with a school in England for their production of Les Miserables, and they had upwards of a £5,000 budget – just for a school production!”
“We’ve got some interesting costumes in here,” Chrissie added. “We’ve got Brian Blessed’s costume from Return to Treasure Island. He was on a chat show recently saying that was his favourite production.”
The company deals with a number of international customers, with rails of costumes regularly being sent to European customers as well as further-flung destinations as far afield as Japan, Spain, Hong Kong, South Africa and Quatar.
The pair also make costumes for various companies, and their expertise has seen Chrissie recently picking up a Bafta Cymru award for the 2013 film The Machine.
The business is being put up for sale because the lease is due to finish on the warehouse in March 2018 and both Chrissie and Lindsay are nearing retirement age. “This is the right opportunity for us,” said Lindsay, who believes there are ‘endless possibilities’ for moving the business forward. “People can move it on better than we can, with website stuff,” he says, and Chrissie agrees. “There’s an awful lot someone with a bit of computer-savvy could get into!”
