Greetings and welcome to Ancient Wisdom 2021
If you missed the review of 2020 newsletter you can read it here.
We are not out of the woods yet, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome. But you can be sure AW will be there to support and help you develop your gift trading business.. whatever they throw at us.
Over the years life at AW has always been an adventure, none as extreme as 2020 but nevertheless it's always been an exciting ride.
I'm hoping the vaccine is good and quick and we will all be allowed to travel, not least so I can see Coco in China. She is our China agent and my wife.. now almost a year since she was here in Spain for New Year.
I'm also missing Ringo our man in Indonesia and lots of contacts including Mr Chatterjee in India. Make sure you add this email address to your contacts, so you don't miss out on this years adventures.
IMPORTANT INFO.. if you have customers in the EU, or are an AW customer in the EU. See below.
Anyway we have lots of plans to develop and bring you the exciting new products to delight your customers and give your business a welcome boost.
Even over Christmas, stock has been arriving, so watch out for lots of things back in stock and few new lines..
Over the next few days the team at AW and I will be devising a plan for the product areas we want to develop in 2021.. if you have any suggestions, needs, ideas or strokes of genius - do click reply and let us know!
So at 11pm last night the UK (most of it) left the EU, and Boris like Moses will lead us into this new exciting promised land where he assures us we will Prosper Mighterly..
At 7am this morning Tomas Whatsapped me.. it's all going wrong already!! Last time he did that it was because our main warehouse burned down.. so I was a little stressed. Turns out that all our websites with the .EU domains had stopped working. Including the very busy AWGifts.eu site.. Sorry your not in the EU now.. you can't use that. Major stress, Raul our IT wizard who lives in KL, Malaysia was already on it.. those domains should be registered to an EU AW company not the UK company..
Haha.. so off to a flying start..
But this is what we expect, it's going to be a wild west for a bit as things realign, whatever happens, stay calm we will find away.
So, many of our customers - and maybe you - have thriving on-line businesses, and maybe you have customers in the EU..
You can still supply them without all the new forms and red tape. AW products can be shipped direct to your customers, and as far as I know it's completely legal. We have two warehouses in Europe one in Spain and one in Slovakia, each warehouse has a Dropshipping website. Slovakia: AW-dropship.eu (in English) and Spain: AW-dropship.es (in Spanish, but google will translate for you and it's pretty easy to use). You will just need to register, then when you sell an AW product to a customer in Europe, you just need to add that customer address to your list and order the product and we do the rest - sending to your customer. Obviously you will need to make sure we have the product in stock in that warehouse before you sell it, but there is no stopping you drop-shipping to your EU customers and thus Prospering Mightily :-)
If you are an EU customer and normally order from the UK website. You can still do this of course, but as you will know there will be customs forms and delays. We also have a plan to get around this, and I'll update you in the near future once we can be sure our systems are functioning. Alternatively you can order directly from our EU warehouses.. Spain: AWArtisan.eu and Slovakia: AWGifts.eu - again you will need to register but these sites are in English. The Spain site is fairly new, so products are still being added but you can always use the online chat if something you need is missing and we can add for you.
SO here we are it's 2021.. let the adventure begin. On behalf of everyone at AW I wish you all the best for the coming year, both in your business and family life.
Take care, stay safe, hold on to your hat.. lets goooooooo...