Life is one long laugh for Abu Dhabi joke shop owner

This week's Portrait of a Nation looks at the 63-year-old Briton who set up the cult shop Posters.

Owner Richard Cartwright is about to open the fifth branch of his Posters chain. Fatima Al Marzooqi / The National

ABU DHABI // Richard Cartwright takes funny business quite seriously.

The 63-year-old Briton has been importing joke items, odd gifts and fancy dress for more than three decades at the helm of Posters, one of Abu Dhabi’s most endearing and eccentric shops.

Custom, high-end picture framing is at the core of Posters’ business but it is the likes of the monster masks and mystic fires also on sale that set the fun store apart.

It is easy to see where he gets inspiration for his eclectic inventory. “I’m childish,” he says bluntly. “I like toys and gifts and things like that, and I just like to play and have fun.”

Mr Cartwright moved to Abu Dhabi in 1975 after he was offered a job as a graphic designer with a company that created logos for Sheikh Khalifa, National Bank of Abu Dhabi and Adco, the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations, among others.

“I could feel there was a great opportunity here,” said Mr Cartwright.

The graphics design work was rewarding but it was not what Mr Cartwright imagined doing for the rest of his life. He wanted to be his own boss, execute his own creative vision.

So he teamed up with another Briton who ran an antiques shop in town and together they got a partner to help them open a lettersetting business called Trett Seeker.

“It wasn’t actually a shop, it was a studio above a toilet store,” Mr Cartwright said.

A long time before computers, Trett Seeker supplied lettersets to graphic design companies, which allowed them to develop more creative typefaces for their brands.

As technological advances began to redefine graphic design, the need for the shop began to dwindle.

“Although I love computers now, at the time they actually destroyed my business,” Mr Cartwright said.

As customers’ needs changed, Trett Seeker did too, becoming Posters in 1982. Its inaugural shop, in the old Tourist Club Area, offered shoppers a wide variety of, well, posters.

“We were trying to fix the ‘white wall’ syndrome,” Mr Cartwright said. “A poster was a very nice way of cheering the flat up quite dramatically and it was just the year posters were coming out, so that’s how it all sort of started.”

Selling posters led to the framing business and, from there, Posters grew to include oddities such a wigs, Rubik’s cubes, fancy dresses, marbles and other gifts imported from the UK.

“We’re trying to make people happy, very happy, and put some of the fun into it,” Mr Cartwright said. “People have stressful jobs and they work in boxes and have to have this kind of awful office life, so I think they like to have a party and move into a play world, really.”

Mr Cartwright met his wife Penelope in the capital and the couple have brought up their three children here. Posters evolved as a family business, with Mrs Cartwright overseeing staff and accounting while one of their daughters, Emma, manages the website, social media, stock control and special events. The Cartwrights’ fifth and largest Posters store is set to open at Dalma Mall in Abu Dhabi in March.

“Posters has survived, I think, largely due to Richard’s vision and recognising what the market needs, what to drop, what to carry on with,” Mrs Cartwright said. “It’s a really interesting thing to be involved with. It’s been a fantastic journey.”

Mr Cartwright said he still runs into customers, now grown-ups, who fondly remember shopping at his quirky store as children. “I end up in meetings and things are very serious and once they find out that I am from Posters, they say, ‘Oh yeah, I used to go there, I used to get stink bombs. I used to launch the stink bombs and I would close the school for a day.’

“Once stink bombs became illegal, I didn’t know what to do with them, so I took a whole carload full of stink bombs and I put them on one of these big bins,” he said with a boyish grin.

“I don’t know what it was like when they put them in the machine – it must have been terrible.”