Finally time to breathe, reflect and eat too much Christmas food

It’s over!! It felt like around a years planning for about a minute of Christmas fairs, I exhagerate, as always, but we can’t belive the Christmas period is all over. We have learnt an awful lot and had the time of our lives. So, lessons learnt –

1. PREPARE, PREPARE, PREPARE – this lesson absolutely deserves capitals and repitition, turns out we weren’t, we thought we were, we were not. We ended up cancelling at least 10 fairs because we simply didnt have the stock to fill (or even partially fill) a stall. We were working (and when I say we, I mean James) until 3am pretty much every morning, making fairy doors, fairies and fairy houses.

2. Be careful what you book – as mentioned previously, between mid November and mid December, we cancelled at least 10 fairs. These were fairs we normally attend, we wanted to attend, we enjoy attending and we know we could have made money at. But, we were simply overstretching ourselves, we can’t do three fairs on one day. Even if we have the stock, we don’t have transport, we thought we would find a way but that was over optimistic! We are gutted that we let down the wonderful people who run these fairs, that was never our intention and we wish we had been a little more honest with outselves.

3. Its nice to be nice – this is James in particular, we already knew this was true, but we have learnt it more and more, our Christmas fairs have been made so much better by the LOVELY people we have met and spent time with, other stallholders, customers and organisers have all been simply wonderful. Something as simple as lending someone your space table, or offfering to run someones stall for the day make you feel lovely, and you can guarentee you will be grateful when they repay your kindness. We know for certain that miserable stallholders don’t have half as much of a good time as we do!

4. Life might get in the way, and thats OK – so, fairs all day, stock making all night, and then your toddler gets poorly. Its not ideal, but obviously Sophia comes first. Our customers could not possibly have been more understanding, neither could Vicky and Lisa when we had to leave spinningfields at 3pm (instead of 7pm) because we had sold out. We were harsher on ourselves than anyone else, but we have learnt to not let it bother us, we would never willingly let a customer down, and that reputation has proceeded us.

5. Don’t think you can get Christmas shopping done – you can’t. Don’t worry about it.

Spinningfields in particular has been amazing, although 2014 has changed our outlook completely, Sophia’s Influence feels like something that we can do, we can succeed at and we can make some money from. We are so proud of our success and our reputation.

We have counted, that almost 350 fairy doors were bought, just from spinningfields, add that to the 100 ish we sold through our online routes and the other fairs we did, that is around 450 people who will now have a fairy living in their house. We are amazed and excited by this and would love to see any pictures of the fairy doors in situ.

Now, we are off for a sleep, a relax, a drink and a lot of food. We will see you in 2015 for an even bigger and better year.

THANK YOU.

When it goes so well, it all goes wrong!!

Hello!!

Firstly we wanted to blog to send a massive apologies to all of our wonderful customers who have been so patient and lovely with us. This Christmas period we have become victims of our own success!!

We are thrilled and amazed at how well Sophia’s Influence is going, fairy doors and magic wands are selling far quicker than we can make them, Santa keys and elf doors have sold out multiple times and we can’t make any more.

We closed the order book 2 weeks before we thought we would because it was full (literally, my book is full!!)

And then, last week, our darling Sophia was super poorly, she was sent home from nursery vomiting and all she wanted was her mummy, so that meant that Jenny was completely stuck, doing lots of toddler snuggling, she was loving it!! But it has meant that we are hugely behind.

So, the upshot of all of this is that we are having to cancel pretty much every fair that isn’t our regular stall at spinningfields, we are working really hard to fulfil all our orders and make sure we have some stock to sell in Manchester, although it is not anywhere near as much as we would have liked to have.

We are so sorry if you were hoping to catch us at a different fair, we have learnt our lesson and we are going to start stocking up for next Christmas in January!!

Hope everyone is brilliant, thank you so much for your support and we hope you have a wonderful Christmas!!

Christmas Fairs

Oh my goodness, it’s that time again!!

That’s right, its Gin O’Clock!! Woop!

But slightly less excitingly, it’s the Christmas period!! We have been super busy in the last few months and we are set to be even busier in the next 6 weeks, in fact, we have a grand total of 3 days off, where we are not at proper work or craft fairs and we are imagining we will be restocking on those days!! But we are not moaning, we love what we do, we meet some of the most amazing people through Sophia’s Influence and we are having the time of our lives!!

So, we thought we better tell you where we will be, we will have stalls at all the events listed here, keep checking back though, its likely we will end up doing a few extra fairs too! Links for more info are at the bottom, or get in touch with us! If you would like to reserve anything for collection at our fairs just let us know!

Weds 12th November – Alston Hall, Grimsargh (evening event)

Friday 14th November – Spinningfields

Saturday 15th November – Spinningfields

Saturday 15th November – Wilmslow (Market Co)

Thursday 20th November – Spinningfields

Friday 21st November – Spinningfields

Saturday 22nd November – Spinningfields

Thursday 27th November – Spinningfields

Friday 28th November – Spinningfields

Saturday 29th November – Spinningfields

Saturday 29th November – Trentham Christmas Extravaganza

Saturday 29th November – Northwich Christmas Extravaganza

Sunday 30th November – Trentham Christmas Extravaganza

Tuesday 2nd December – Hale Golf Club (evening event)

Thursday 4th December – Spinningfields

Friday 5rd December – Spinningfields

Saturday 6th December – Spinningfields

Saturday 6th December – Cheadle

Saturday 7th December – Bramhall Christmas fair

Thursday 11th December – Spinningfields

Friday 12th December – Spinningfields

Saturday 13th December – Spinningfields

Saturday 13th December – Northwich

Saturday 14th December – The New Continental

Thursday 18th December – Spinningfields

Friday 19th December – Spinningfields

Saturday 20th December – Spinningfields

Saturday 20th December – Middlewich

Flippin eck! I just counted and that’s 28 craft fairs in total!!I think we are going to deserve a holiday after this lot!!

Spinningfields Info

Alston Hall Info

Trentham/Northwich/Wilmslow Info

Middlewich/Bramhall/Cheadle Info

Sophia’s Influence Make Joe’s Morning!

So, this morning, most of the Sophia’s Influence team had a super exciting adventure! We drove to Macclesfield, over an hour away at 6.30am to leave a fairy door outside a little boy’s front door so it was waiting for him when he got up.

Our exciting adventure started at about 9pm last night, we received a lovely email from Harry and Joe’s mum, Lucy. She told us how much Harry loved the fairy door he had received for his birthday that day but that her other son, Joe, had gone to bed crying because he didn’t have a fairy living in his room. Lucy was hoping to buy one for Joe too. We emailed back and forth to arrange how we could get a door as quickly as possible to Joe. Lucy told us how Joe had written a letter to Harry’s fairy to ask him if he had a friend who could live with him and when we heard that, we realised how special Joe is and thought we had to something nice for him!

So, James suggested that we get up super early and get a fairy door to his house for when he got up! We asked Lucy what she thought, she was about as excited as us!!

After swapping addresses and sending pictures of some doors to choose the one Joe would like, the mission was on!!

We made a little letter explaining that Harry’s fairy had told everyone how nice their house was, and would Joe mind having a fairy live in his room, we were going to leave that outside.

6am and the alarm went off, bleary eyed we jumped up, Sophia still in her PJs off we went. Jenny ‘livetweeted’ the journey using #fairydoordelivery. There was lots of traffic on the M6!!

At 7.40am, we finally made it and left the wonderful Joe a present on his doorstep.

The lovely Lucy filmed Joe’s reaction when he found his door and she has generously allowed us to share the video! You can see it on our Facebook page. We are so glad we managed to keep the magic alive for this lovely boy, and that he was excited when he found his door! What a lovely way to spend a Friday morning before work and nursery!

One business on hiatus, one business expanding, one member of the team drinking no alcohol, the other two drinking far too much. Fairy Doors, Fairy Houses and Manchester, one big catch up!!

Sooooo, LoveCraft is over, for now. Before we decided to go on hiatus, we ran our last event for a while at Hoghton Tower, it was absolutely brilliant, the crafters who came were simply amazing, the barn was converted again into a space full of the best in handmade products to be found in Lancashire, the sunshine stayed out for us and for the first time ever we had entertainment.

Dani Gallagher was our singer, she approached us and we wish we had heard of her sooner, she is simply incredible. Her talent is second to none, but her attitude and personality made our event! We also had the amazing teardrop café who with their unique vintage teardrop café, kept us all awake with their gorgeous coffee and with their fabulous dancing!! We had more amazing crafters than we can write about.

It was great to go out on a high, but after our event we did wonder if we had made the right decision. The Monday after this we heard from Fishergate Shopping Centre, who, for lots of reasons let us know that there is no way we can have the escalators on or open for our events, this pretty much means, people can’t get into our event. We suddenly realised we had made the exact right decision. We set up LoveCraft to run great fairs, to bring handmade products to a new audience, to showcase the amazing handmade talent in the city centre, and we are not able to do that. We have tried for a year to achieve what we set out to do, we have had some amazing times but in its current form, LoveCraft is not achieving its aims. We are certain we will be back, we don’t know how or when, but we will!!

Anyhow, LoveCraft might be on hiatus, but with that, Sophia’s Influence is becoming bigger and better, James has more time to devote to his crafts which has led to a castle made from recycled pallet wood, which sold before we had chance to photograph it. An amazing pallet wood pirate ship and four (with more on the go) beautiful fairy houses made from completely recycled materials. Fairy Doors are flying out about as fast as Jenny can make them. We have recently started selling fairy door gift sets which come with fairy dust, a key, some vinyl stickers and instructions, all in a hand stamped gift box, we took these to Manchester yesterday and we got a brilliant response!!

Amanda’s cards are improving every fair we go to, she has discovered stamps and scrabble letters and is loving them!!

Sophia’s Influence have also decided we need to go outside of Lancashire and have recently started to do fairs more towards Manchester, so far we have been to Bramhall, Middlewich and Northwich and we plan to do lots more, we have had some amazing days, financially Northwich was the best fair we have ever done!!

Important News – LoveCraft on indefinite hiatus

Hello everyone,

As you can tell from the title of this post we have decided to take a break from LoveCraft for a while and put the business on hold. Coming up to our first birthday we’ve thought about the year and think it’s time for us to take some well deserved rest and reflect on all the things we’ve done so far.
It’s been a rollercoaster year for us, and we’ve achieved so much in our short time, but LoveCraft hasn’t always worked as well as we would like. From drama’s involving changing venues, broken escalators, miscommunication, the opening and closing of a shop and much more, we’ve really gone through it all! and we really feel we need to take some time out and think about the future of our business.
ever since our first fair, things at Fishergate have always been….challenging, and as we are STILL having issues with the management about space and access a year on it’s really not worth trying to continue and struggle. We don’t believe running events for our lovely crafters is fair, when we know there are potential issues and worries about the venue. Until we can find a definite venue with good footfall, access and visibility it’s just not worth our, or your time. We have had an amazing time and met some fantastic people, and We’ll all still be attending fairs and look forward to meeting up with you all in the future. We would like to say thank you to each and every one of the crafters who have attended our events and made them so special. We all feel that we have made some good friends, and met people we would love to keep in touch with.
However this is not the end for us, just a pause. We’re hoping we can find the amazing venue and opportunity we deserve and will be taking he rest of the year to plan and scheme about what we can get up to next! So please keep in touch via facebook/twitter and email and we’ll keep you updated with all our exploits.

Thank you so much for all your help, support and inspiration this year!

James, Jen, Amanda + Sophia

Blackburn Update!

Booking Form

Below is the text we have sent to crafters, apologies if you didn’t get it, we wanted to keep everyone in the loop!!

Hello lovely crafters,

Hope everyone is having a fab time and is enjoying the little bit of sunshine we have been seeing.

We are emailing with an update to our exciting venture in Blackburn!! You might have already seen this news, but The Amazing Coconut Rose Bakery are taking over the café and it will soon become the Coconut Rose Tearoom. Their ideas are wonderful, although it will remain a vegetarian café Coconut Rose are putting their own touch on the décor, menu and general feel of the place. It also means LoveCraft will be working much more closely with the Tearoom and will be hosting regular events in there, including craft groups, knit and natter groups and book groups.

Due to this exciting news we have decided to put our opening back so that we will be opening at the same time. So, the finalised plan is a champagne reception on Friday 11th April in the evening. We will have the mayor of Blackburn attending and lots of press and radio. We will then be open for business from Saturday 12th April.

More exciting news is The Queen is coming to Blackburn on the 17th April for Maundy Thursday, where she will be visiting Blackburn cathedral to give out Maundy money. The cathedral is on the same road as our shop and Blackburn council is expecting at least 30,000 people to line the streets. We will be advertising heavily on the lead up to this and during the day. Coconut Rose have some exciting ideas for royal themed treats and we will be flyering like there is no tomorrow! What amazing publicity, so close to our opening!! 

We currently have lots of crafters already booked on but we know lots more have said they are interested. If you are interested please don’t forget to get your booking form back to us, we have a little bit of space left!! We need booking forms back by the 4th April at the absolute latest!! And don’t forget we have an introductory offer of only £30 per month for the first 3 months!!

 

If you are already booked on, we will be in touch this week with details for dropping off your products and recording your stock.

There is more info attached along with a booking form.

Please contact us with any questions, we can’t wait to hear from you!!

James, Jenny, Amanda & Sophia

LoveCraft @ Hoghton Tower

So, it was finally here, the event we had spent more time, energy and money planning and advertising than any other event. We were really nervous, not least because Lancashire Market was so brilliant the day before, but mainly because our Hoghton Tower event was the first ever event where customers were coming only to LoveCraft. People would have to drive to Hoghton Tower, soley to attend our craft fair!!! Eeeeeeep!

We were pretty confident we had advertised well, over £600 worth of radio advertising, over 2000 flyers, 150 posters and 4 massive banners! If people didn’t turn up, it wasn’t because they didn’t know it was on. The LoveCraft team arrived by 7.15am, it was still very dark, and it was absolutely freezing!

First job was setting out tables and deciding where everyone should go. This is really hard and something we try to do fairly at all LoveCraft events, although we get a fair bit of stick about stall placing. Obviously everyone wants the ‘best pitch’ but, clearly not everyone can have it. At Hoghton Tower we had the main barn and 2 outbuildings, we decided that anyone with ‘paper’ like artwork or cards should be in the barn, just in case the rain started. Then we tried to make sure no one was next to anyone selling similar products. People generally were not happy about being in the outbuildings but we really didn’t feel that this should affect anything, all customers had to walk past both outbuildings on their way from the car park anyway. So Amanda and James sorted the tables, Jenny just faffed about mainly. Then the crafters started arriving!! Before we knew it, the big old empty spaces were filled with incredible handmade products, we had knitted products, clay, jewellery, personalised artwork, soaps, marmalade and loads more!!

Customers started arriving at 10am on the dot, and we really needn’t have worried about getting customers into LoveCraft, for pretty much all day there was a queue of cars coming up the fabulous Hoghton Tower driveway. Our crafters had a really good day and so did we. We had a few comments about the car parking fee, this was set by Hoghton Tower and we couldn’t have changed it. We also had comments about the outbuilding pitches, being cold and not as good as inside the barn. We couldn’t change the temperature, and trust us when we say it was equally as cold in the barn, the music was provided by another crafter, not us, and customers were encouraged to look around the whole event so we felt the pitches were just as good. We will look into that for future Hoghton Tower events which are the 27th July 2014 and the 14th December 2014. We are already super excited about these events!!

Lancashire Market – The One Where We All Made Loads of Money but Froze our Toes In The Process

The next weekend (this was our 3rd weekend in a row – can you see why this blog is so late?!?) we had taken on a mammoth challenge, as if running 2 businesses with full time jobs and a toddler wasn’t enough of a challenge. We decided to do it all in one weekend!! So, on the 7th and 8th December we had a stall at the amazing Lancashire Market in Preston City Centre and on the 8th December we were running our biggest event yet at Hoghton Tower where Sophia’s Influence also had a stall. We convinced my wonderful dad to have Sophia on the 8th or we might have actually exploded with stress and set about figuring this out.

Lancashire Market had been super successful for us in the past so we really needed to make sure we had enough stock, plus we needed enough stock for our stall at Hoghton Tower.

We arrived at the flag market in Preston for 8am to find our stall, we originally didn’t have the best stall, in fact we were blocked in by lots of owls, but after a quiet word with the very nice Preston BID people we moved to an amazing stall on a corner. We moved once we had already set up, so we had rain and wind against us, eventually we were ready to get cracking and open the stall.

We had an absolutely brilliant day! Feedback was amazing and all our products were flying out, we both wore thermal socks but still had frozen toes. We had a few trips to costa and both had a wander round the market. Signs were selling like hotcakes and I was going to need to stock up for Hoghton Tower at this rate.

For Sunday we had roped some of our friends, the wonderful Grace and Sean (Grace of Grace Galdo Designs, fabulous jewellery!) in to run our stall at Lancashire Market. They had a fab day to and overall we made more pennies than we have at any other fair 🙂 one day soon this crafting malarkey will make us our millions!!

Crafty Vintage @ Brockholes – The Sparkly Christmas Version

Finally!! Sophia’s Influence had a stall at an event we were not running, BLISS!! Amanda and I were very excited to relax and eat pancakes for breakfast, pizza for lunch and cake for well…anytime. No panicking or running round like headless chickens, we left that to the lovely Laura and the rest of the Crafty Vintage team. We had a stall in the conference room, in a corner where customers couldn’t fail to notice us and right next to the super talented Claire from Realicoul (https://beta.folksy.com/shops/Realicoul) where we both spent a fair amount of our profits.

We had taken along lots of Christmas stock, a box of fabulous Christmas cards, many Christmas signs and Christmas jewellery and wine charms, we arrived bright and early on Saturday and set up camp for the weekend. Some of our lovely colleagues weren’t so lucky, with a  bit of a switcharoo by Crafty Vintage lots of stalls were now in a marque on the floating visitors centre, and in a totally unplanned turn of events, the cold weather overnight accompanied by the sunshine in the morning meant that condensation covered the roof and caused some rather fetching table swimming pools. A few crafters had to mop up before they set up, but by 11am everyone was ready to greet the first bunch of customers, even if we were shivering while we did so.

As usual with Crafty Vintage events, we had a steady flow of customers all weekend, our Christmas products got great comments and we sold lots and lots and ate even more! We really enjoy running the Sophia’s Influence stall, this is why we started this whole debacle, as an excuse to hang out and have a natter as best mates without Sophia and the boys. It was a brilliant weekend and we asked Laura to book us on for all the Brockholes events in 2014, so we will see you there!!