Neluka Dunning of The Zip Yard alteration and repair service showcases her favourite fashion looks at her beautiful Yorkshire home

Trousers can be altered to fit perfectly, reshaping the seat or tapering the legs into a more contemporary style. Stores carry out bridalwear and prom dress alterations, leather repairs, they might help adapt clothes for people with disabilities. Those with difficulties such as arthritis might come in for little repairs, sewing on a button, stitching a tear.

“Just shortening the sleeves on a jacket will improve how someone holds themselves when entering a room,” Neluka says. “Having a dress that properly fits gives you so much more confidence. What I love about The Zip Yard is, not only are you making people feel good in what they wear, you are helping your customers prolong the life of their clothes.”

Neluka owns the franchise rights to The Zip Yard GB and owns two of the 16 GB Zip Yard stores (there are 51 in all, including the ones across Ireland (the company was founded in Belfast in 2005).

She bought her first branch, in Chapel Allerton, in October, 2018. “I stumbled on The Zip Yard,” she says. “I needed some clothes altering and I’m very big on sustainability and repair and reworking.

“When I stepped into The Zip Yard, it was a different type of alteration company. It was clean and it had fitting rooms with doors and you felt secure there. It was not in a seedy back street.”

Now 45, Neluka has lived in Yorkshire since she was 23. She was born in Wales to Sri Lankan parents (her father worked for British Rail, while her mother looked after five children and had cleaning jobs - Neluka means blue sky).

At school, she was academic but also interested in dance, singing, art and making. “I was quite creative as a child,” she says. “Life was so different back then. We did a lot of playing in the garden and making little dens.”

After A-levels in Business, Psychology and Sociology, she went straight into work. “I was going down the Law road, and I wasn’t sure if that was for me, so I took a year out and ended up getting a job for a packaging company, and I excelled in it so I realised that sales was what I enjoyed doing.”

She worked her way up. “I enjoyed talking to people about what we were making and how it was going to help them.”

Neluka met her husband, Neil, a Yorkshireman from Pontefract, on a night out in Wales. Their relationship was long-distance until she moved to Yorkshire to be with him. Neil works for a US company as VP for global operations and has his own business as a manufacturing consultant. “I moved for love. He stole my heart, and the rest is history,” she says.

They settled in Leeds and Neluka found a job with another packaging company and continued developing her career at various companies in the manufacturing sector. When she got pregnant, her role was made redundant.

“I was in a position where I had no choice really,” she says. “There was no work for me to go back to and nobody employs you when you have got such a tiny baby, so I became a stay-at-home mum. There are two-and-a-half years between my son and my daughter, and luckily we could manage on one salary.”

For 10 years she dedicated herself to her children’s upbringing. “It worked out for the best,” she says. “It changes you. I remember going from being very corporate to growing carrots in the garden with my son. I became quite an earthy mum, steaming spinach as their first food. People wouldn’t have thought it was me. But there was always this urge. I have always worked, always liked my own independence, and having a little girl made me want her to see that women can do things.”

Neluka wanted to find work within school hours, not too far from home. In 2018, she found The Zip Store in Chapel Allerton. “I rang my husband and said, ‘I think I know what I want to do.’”

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She had to wait a few months until the shop was for sale, and took over in October 2019, using her sales and training skills to grow the business. Then Covid happened. “The year after Covid, my figures were better than ever, due to everyone repairing their clothes,” she says.

She has partnered with Tesco and now owns another store at Tesco Extra Toton, Nottingham - and she has acquired the franchise rights to The Zip Yard GB. The Zip Yard’s franchise scheme proved invalable. “They hold your hand right through that process and you have a lot of support,” she says.

Neluka learned altering skills as she went along, although she leaves the sewing to the experts. She prides herself on the number of returning customers, and on the contribution The Zip Yard makes towards sustainability and the environment by reducing the need to buy new clothes, and the volume of clothes thrown into landfill. The Zip Yard recycles alteration offcuts for internal patchworking. “We do a better stitch so, when we repair, it lasts even longer,” she says.

“During recessions we do well because we do a lot more repair work, and when we are out of recession, we do well because everyone is altering and tailoring their clothes.”

Neluka’s goal is to have a Zip Yard in every city. “There are opportunities for anyone to open their own Zip Yard and enjoy everything about it, as I do,” she says.

“One of the main aspects of running my business that gives me a great deal of gratification is making people feel good in what they wear, which in turn makes them feel good about themselves.”

thezipyard.co.uk