06/10/2026
Yesterday marked 8 years since I officially took over Handmade Design.
A lot has changed in that time. I’ve made it a real priority to keep learning, doing courses, improving our systems and making sure the business keeps moving forward rather than standing still.
But alongside all of that, there have also been plenty of slightly chaotic moments that definitely weren’t covered in any business course…
On my very first day as owner, I arrived ready to open the shop and realised I had absolutely no float for the till. I rang Mum in a panic, ran to the cash machine, then went around a few local shops buying tiny things with £20 notes so I could cobble together enough change to actually trade.
Taking over in October also meant I was thrown straight into Christmas. There were a lot of very late nights restocking shelves because we didn’t have a proper stock or restocking system yet, and I was learning very quickly what worked and what absolutely didn’t.
My first market involved me seriously overestimating how long my phone battery would last and then running around Stratford-upon-Avon trying to find a power bank so we could keep using the card machine.
During Covid, Mum and I would come over to the closed shop a few times a week to pack online orders. I did Facebook Lives every week with gift ideas, offered free local delivery on my drive between home and the shop, and ended up delivering parcels all over the place. My weekly treat was usually a takeaway pizza from Beaumonts eaten in the shop while we packed orders.
In the early days, we also handwritten every single item we sold in a notebook, and I’d spend hours later typing every line up. Moving to an electronic system genuinely felt revolutionary.
At one point I got our Instagram account hacked after clicking a dodgy link. They tried to extort money from me to get it back and, in a moment of desperation, I genuinely looked into hiring an ethical hacker to hack them back. Thankfully Instagram eventually restored the account.
Then there was the first time I left Orla unsupervised in the shop while I nipped to the Post Office with customer orders and came back to a half-eaten beeswax candle. At least she cho
