Hello hello!
I thought we were due a catch-up as I haven’t chatted here in a while. I try to keep in touch but the days seem to pass so quickly.
If you’ve been here a while then you have watched this little Stitchery business evolve. We have grown in so many ways from very humble beginnings yet we are still a very small and very personal family operation. Our first kits were printed in our spare bedroom on our home computer, popped into hand-stitched vellum wallets (stitched on a regular sewing machine) and closed with (beautiful) tags, hand-written by Kate at Oyster Bridge & Co. We made the thread cards at home too; punching hundreds of holes with single hand-held hold punches, usually done in the dead of night in our living room whilst watching episodes of Criminal Minds. Drew, my husband, helped in the hours outside his job (a business banking Area Director for one of the big four banks).
Whilst we have our kits professionally printed now, and a machine cuts thousands of holes at a time for our thread cards, we still make up all of the kits ourselves, in-house. We hand-cut hundreds of antique linen sheets and print them ourselves, one at a time. Ribbons are carefully threaded through folders, adorned with a Stitchery swing tag and tied in pretty bows; we’re not watching Criminal Minds any more but we do listen to Radio 2 as we work and compete against each other in Ken Bruce’s Pop Master. (The loser has to make everyone a cup of tea. Drew has been making a lot of tea.)
Our suppliers are mostly small businesses too. Our beautiful design work is done by a gorgeous, very talented, Graphic Designer I met once in a yoga class. The printing is sent to small UK printers and our antique linen is bought from self-employed antique dealers. My sister fills the thread cards each month and does so from home, enabling her to earn a living and still be there for her family too. Orders are fulfilled from my studio, we print postage labels for Click and Drop with Royal Mail but then we pack our Estate with bags and boxes at the end of every day and drive them to the post office ourselves.
The Stitchery studio on a rare tidy day. Here is where we make kits, cut and print linen then package and post your orders.
I prefer to shop with small businesses myself and I want to always retain that small-business mentality here at The Stitchery; care for our customer, quality control and beautiful packaging, with a watchful eye on sustainability. It would be so easy to outsource all of the work and have Amazon deliver our kits for us, but I don’t want to do that. My friends come to help out in busy periods and everyone who works here is a stitching enthusiast (apart from Drew although he’s learning!). Your kits are put together by people who feel the same way that you do about fabric, sewing and embroidery.
We held our first online shopping event at the end of July and received more orders than I could ever have even dreamed of. I launched a variety of kits all on the same day so that customers could order everything they wanted at once and not have to place multiple orders with multiple postage costs over a series of weeks. I think it works best for our customers to do that; I know from experience that it is super annoying to place an order one day and then see there is another new product just the following week (especially when buying from an overseas business). But I didn’t anticipate just how much work would be involved in picking and packing those orders. I under-estimated how popular everything would be too - I am still in that ‘pinch-me’ phase where I can’t quite believe that people like what I design.
We’re working on a two-week delay at the moment, purely due to the shopping event (and a gorgeous article in Victoria magazine that was published at the same time). We continue to work at our usual careful pace to make sure that your kits are properly packaged and carefully wrapped; we expect to be back up-to-date by the end of the weekend. Thank you for bearing with us and please do accept our apologies for the delay if you are waiting on an order. We appreciate your patience, thank you.
Future Shopping Events
With all that said, I do think that shopping launches and events are the way forward for us and our customers. We will be better prepared for the number of orders in future! (We recognise that we need to become more proactive with our communication too.)
Our next shopping event will be held on 16th September 2021
100 Days to Christmas - with a focus on Christmas gift ideas and launches of a few new products pre-Christmas including the ability to pre-order thread sets). This will be our last shopping event before Christmas.
We won’t be participating in Black Friday on 26th November - I don’t believe in it - BUT
I will be releasing my annual Charity Christmas pattern on Black Friday and holding an online embroidery class for that pattern with all of the profit from the event going to charity.
Small Business Saturday is on 4th December here in the UK and I will be holding
a small event at the studio to coincide with our regular Stitch Club Saturday, which is always on the first Saturday of every month.
Please do sign up to our newsletter for information on forthcoming events and class/kit launches. There are opt-in forms on every page of this website.
We are heading off for a working week at the Coast and any orders placed today or after won’t be sent out until w/c 23rd August. Please bear this in mind before you place an order.
Thank you for reading, thank you for being here. Enjoy the rest of your August and I’ll be in touch via newsletter next week.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Love and sunshine,
Nicki xx