Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy.Shakespeare · Hamlet, Act I Scene 3

About us

Ten years of finding out what actually works

richnotgaudy has spent 10 years in and around specialist supply — hospitality, estates, professional kitchens. In that time the same lesson kept repeating: the products that hold up are almost never the ones with the biggest marketing budget. They are the ones the people doing the work quietly reorder.

How a product reaches us

Every listing arrives one of two ways, and the listing says which.

We go and look

Where we can, we visit the site the product is used on — the suite floor, the walled garden, the pass — and watch it do the job before a single word is written about it.

Or we buy through a contracted supplier

Where a visit is not practical, the product comes through a supplier we already hold an agreement with, so provenance and batch are documented rather than assumed.

We buy it at retail

Review stock is purchased, not gifted. It costs more and it is the only way the write-up stays ours.

What we sell, and what we do not

We do

  • Stock a short catalogue we can stand behind item by item.
  • Publish the reasoning, including where a product fell short.
  • Keep supply narrow enough that we know each batch.

We do not

  • Take payment for a listing or for catalogue position.
  • Let a supplier approve or edit our wording.
  • Carry a range so wide we cannot have used all of it.

The shelves

Company details

Registered name
I953 LTD
Company number
10822076
Registered office
27 Old Gloucester Street, London, United Kingdom, WC1N 3AX
Dispatch
United Kingdom
Contact us