The Derbyshire business has its playing cards for sale at Buckingham Palace, but getting them over the Channel is now a ‘nightmare’
With products on sale at Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and museums across the country – as well in European capitals – Jeremy Shaw, managing director of Derbyshire-based Heritage Playing Cards, has particular reason to hope the coronation will be good for the business he set up 30 years ago.
The past few years have been anything but. First, the Covid pandemic shut all museums and their shops, meaning an almost total collapse in domestic and overseas sales. And then the country’s leading producer of heritage playing cards – whose popular kings and queens of England pack has been updated ahead of the coronation to include one of Charles III – saw its export business almost completely wiped out by Brexit.