PEACHTREE ADVISORY | Business Feature
Business Feature • May 2026
I have a theory about the businesses that last. It’s not the ones with the slickest branding or the biggest marketing budget. It’s the ones built by people who genuinely couldn’t help themselves. People who looked at a problem and just started solving it, usually before anyone told them it was a good idea.
Petina Walsh, known as Tina, is one of those people.
Tina’s path to running four retail locations across Adelaide started somewhere unexpected: the cockpit. A remote area pilot of all things, she met her husband somewhere between take-offs, and eventually found herself managing her father’s ceiling company payroll via fax from a remote cable station on her lunch break. When she and her husband went through IVF, something shifted. She started looking at everything differently. What was actually in the products she’d been using for years? Where did the ingredients come from? Were any of them doing more harm than good?
It’s the kind of question that sounds like overthinking until you realise how many extraordinary businesses have started exactly that way.
Her answer was tallow. Specifically, a tallow-based moisturiser she’d been formulating since 2012, sourced from organic, grass-fed, hormone-free cattle through farmers she knows personally, rendered by hand, made into cream. She was reading wellness blogs when tallow was genuinely unfashionable. She copped grief online from vegans for years. She opened every post with “not for vegans” just to save everyone the trouble. Fast forward to now, and tallow skincare is one of the hottest categories in the wellness world. Tina was there a decade ago.
But the skincare is only part of the story. What became OmMade Meet The Maker started at a weekend market where Tina looked around and noticed something. There were more stallholders than customers. Everyone was setting up, packing down, paying market fees, getting rained on, and watching each other more than they were watching the till. She thought: what if we stopped competing and started combining?
That idea became a space under the travelator in the Central Market. The original store has since moved to Adelaide Arcade, and OmMade now has four locations across the city, including Marion, West Lakes and Tea Tree Plaza, supporting around sixty maker businesses and working with roughly sixteen makers in-store. Each one shows up, works their half-day shift, sells their own products and each other’s, and shares the rent, the time, and the relationship with the customer.
What I find genuinely interesting about this model is what it does to service. When I sat down with Tina, she talked about the customer feedback they receive. Specifically, how people walk in and immediately notice the store feels different. That’s because the person behind the counter made what’s on the shelf. They’re not reading from a script. They actually care whether you find the right thing. Forty-eight percent of OmMade’s customers come back. In retail, that number is extraordinary.
There’s Giselle from Shaker & Co, who makes polymer clay earrings and will change a backing or swap a hook on the spot, right there at the counter, because she’s the maker and she can. There’s Rachel with her crystals, whose regulars follow her between stores to get her advice. There’s Jo Bertrum, who’ll sit and paint in-store so customers can watch a piece come to life. You can’t manufacture that experience. You can’t import it.
When I asked Tina what the defining moment was, she didn’t hesitate. It was COVID. When other retailers closed. Tina didn’t. She stayed open, gave her makers the choice to come in or consign, and kept serving the community. It was during that period that Westfield noticed OmMade. What started as a six-month casual lease at Marion became three years, and then the other locations followed. Sometimes doing the right thing just turns out to also be the smart thing.
The next chapter for OmMade is a live online shop, a format that finally makes sense of a store where every product is a one-off, handmade by someone you can actually talk to. It’s the right move for a business built on story, on connection, on the kind of thing you can’t find on a shelf at a big box retailer.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone you care about, or you just want to walk into a shop that feels like it was put together by people who actually give a damn, OmMade Meet The Maker is worth your time.
Adam Peach is a business coach, advisor and retail specialist based in Adelaide. He runs Peachtree Advisory Pty Ltd, Building Local Communities by Building Local Businesses.
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