2020 - What a Year!

2020 - What a Year!

 

Well ..... that was a year to remember!

First and foremost we want to take the time to thank all of you so so much for our first full year in business. We appreciate all the support you have given us so much whether it is buying, telling your friends, a share, or even just a like on social.

So - What did we get up to?

January 2020

ivy and twine candles stand at glasgow trade show

Off the back of what was a pretty busy winter period for us we dived into January excited to showcase our brand new fragrances to our retailers at Scotlands Trade Fair, we met some lovely lovely people there and even picked up half a dozen new shops to stock our products.

ivy and twine candles scotland trade fair 2020 glasgow

February

We worked tirelessly to get all the orders from the trade show out the door as quickly as we could... little did we know what was coming

March

We went on Holiday (our last for a while, unknown to us!) to celebrate my 30th Birthday, and by the time we returned the UK was days away from its first lockdown. So we messaged our retailers asking them if they needed help from us (time to pay etc) not to worry about it and that we would get through this together. (everybody was fantastic and paid their invoices on time so again to all of you thank you so much) So we hunkered down cut off all of our spending and hoped this would blow over....

April

Drink lots of tea - get really good at making Strawberry Daiquiris and finish the garden off (a job i had been putting to the side for about a year haha.)...not an awful lot else happened as we decided to hunker down and not spend any money haha.

May

Georgina started getting into TikTok and has now put a few videos out - pretty much for fun because she enjoys doing them. At this point its clear Covid is going to be here a while and we are going to have to adjust our business model which was always to stock our lovely retailers to help gain exposure for our brand. However by May its seems we will be in lockdown for a while so we reached out to our local community in Kinross.

The Response was amazing, we offered free delivery within the KY13 postcode and most days we got to delivery our beautiful handmade candles as a couple with our Golden Retriever Penny. 

georgina and penny delivering ivy and twine candles in kinross

June

Ivy & Twine Candles went viral! So remember TikTok - that thing my amazing wife does just for fun? Yeah so apparently people on there LOVE Ivy & Twine Candles! (and rightly so!) ...and this is what Happened:

Ivy & Twine candles TikTok goes Viral

Yup - 6.5 Million views and over 1.2 million likes. Initially it started trending in the UK and we had hundreds of orders over a few days, we stressed out ... but we coped. Then AMERICA BLEW UP! We were out on a walk with Penny and started getting these messages through about shipping to the USA (which we didn't do). Another and Another and Another.... very weird. so georgina went onto the back end of our website on her phone to see approx 400 people an America on our website (at this point if we had 3 in the uk at one time we were pleased!) 

So poor penny had a very shortened walk as we ran back to the house - calculated shipping to USA, marked it live online and emailed everyone who had 'abandoned' there cart because there was no shipping option.

Needless to see all of this resulted in more orders going out in the space of 2 weeks than we had done in the 9 months of business since we started combined! 

We didn't sleep much - but love you all for it.

July

After a Request on TikTok Georgina wanted to make the 'Harry Styles' Candle, so we created a limited edition candle which sold out in minutes. so after rigorous testing we did another batch of 100 candles.... which also sold out. This is now our Cashmere Vanilla Fragrance and is available all year round as a candle, diffuser or diffuser refill.

August

We spent most of August replenishing stock and facilitating our trade orders as shops had just begun to start reopening and were gearing up for a hopefully busy Christmas, so to ensure the best service we could we made candles and diffusers around the clock to ensure there was no delay in getting orders out the door.

We also celebrated our one year Wedding Anniversary - symbolic here because that is where Ivy & Twine was originally born, not as a business but as a decoration for our own wedding. 

gordon and georgina anniversary ivy and twine

 

September

We saw a huge number of orders for winter stock for immediate despatch which we sent out straight away - and a number of retailers had asked for October deliveries so we spotted a gap to get a little weekend break before the mad season of candle buying was upon us! 

opengate campsite dumfries and galloway 

We also 'Officially' Turned One :-)

ivy and twine birthday

October

Winter Fragrances Launched on the 3rd at noon! The official launch of our winter lines on our website which introduced our fab new additions 'Mulled Wine' and 'Christmas Tree' both of which will most certainly be making a return this year in 2021!

November

We Launched our Soaps and Lotions Line! This had been in the pipeline since January, however with the new additions to our spring line we thought best not to launch too much and once so we thought we would delay it for a month or two..... then when covid hit you couldn't buy pumps or bottles anywhere for love nor money so we put the idea on the back burner till now!

soaps and lotions Ivy & Twine

December

We headed down to London with our biggest order ever! ..... social video to follow, you'll just have to tune in to our new youtube channel (almost up and running) to see what we did in December:

ivy and twine youtube channel

Subscribe to our upcoming Youtube channel to keep up to date with all things ivy and twine, behind the scenes footage, tips and tricks, and lots of interesting content.

Thanks for Reading,

Gordon Robertson

Co-Owner and The Lucky Half  of Ivy & Twine

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