It took 5 years of hard work and persistence, hand cutting and making our products 7 days a week, no holidays, no breaks, freeeezing our arses off for 11 months of the year on our market stall, and generally not sleeping quite as much as we'd like to.
As I write this, I'm stood here behind our counter wearing a teeshirt, leaning over a heater (yeah, I know – why not put a jumper on?), sipping hot coffee and listening to a little B.B King, from a "Beefhart free" playlist deemed to be safe and suitable by Sophia, and now after only two weeks – by gritty market trader standards – I have officially become "A Lady", and you know what? It's not actually that bad.
We've decorated the shop in Autumn colours, carved some awesome pumpkins, and celebrated a great opening evening in the shop with all of our friends from the market, the evening ended with a random drunk circulating the shop drinking everything he could get his hands on – the weird thing about this particular drunk was that I'd been politely tolerating him and chatting with him all evening thinking he was with one of our friends, when instead he was random complicated drunk in off the street. Weirder still, late into the night we were gifted with a second drunk, this one was my favourite – he stood at our window staring in, sipping Super Tennants and aggressively pointing at our friend Jordan (from Denise & Duddley), I went outside and told him to bugger off, he stared at me for a while, dribbled, and then turned his attention back to Jordan. After roughly a quarter of an hour of "Jordan staring" he started yelling something about not being happy with "this handbag situation" and that we should be making "f*cking scarves" because "it's f*cking freezing out here!!" I couldn't have agreed more, it was cold out there and myself and Sophia have been talking about making some beautiful knitted scarves for a while now. The situation with scarf man was rapidly deteriorating outside, it was time for the evening to end, we left out the back entrance since it just wouldn't have been safe for Jordan to leave via the front. I had a great time.
As of the 3rd of November, 2010, we've been open for 2 weeks! I know, it's a little strange that it's taken 2 weeks to announce the opening of our first shop here on our website, particularly when we're getting emails from customers asking "When's your shop opening?" but we've had a "thing" with BT and and internet access, which made updating the site almost impossible.
We're open every day from 10am until 6.30pm. We'll be introducing lot's of new products hopefully in time for Christmas so pop in and take a look.
The imaginatively titled "Our Shop is Open!" article. →
