Funky Fidgets Shop wins Echo Best Independent Retailer 2026

Funky Fidgets Shop in Darlington won the echo’s Best Independent Retailer 2026 award after readers backed the family-run business. Alex Stubbs started the shop as an online fidget-toy seller during the Covid-19 lockdown when he was 16. What began in lockdown now draws customers from across the UK and sends parcels as far as Australia.

Borough Road to national orders

The business opened its physical store on Borough Road two years ago, giving the online brand a fixed base in Darlington. Its range includes teddies, putties, lanyards, joke toys and poppers, and the toys also serve as sensory objects for the SEN community.

Melissa Brunskill, Stubbs’s mum and full-time support for the shop, quit her job in 2021 to help run it. She said, “It’s an honour. There were some fantastic businesses in the competition, and they all deserved recognition.”

Melissa Brunskill on the win

Brunskill added, “We’ve worked so hard, and our community, both online and locally, has been exceptional.” She said, “It’s really nice to be rewarded and recognised. We are absolutely over the moon.”

The award also reflects how the shop has built a large audience online, with hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers. That scale helps explain why a Darlington store can now pull visitors from far beyond the town and ship products internationally.

Bigger premises for Funky Fidgets

Brunskill said, “We are on the hunt for bigger premises. That’s the next step for us - a bigger toy store. We are blown away by how many people come to visit us here.”

The next question is whether the team can find enough room to match demand without losing the local shop feel that helped carry it from a lockdown side project to a reader-voted award winner.