Hope you had a good week, and things are picking up for the upcoming season of love, kicking off with Valentine's day.. in only 3 weeks.

It's been super busy, partly because of the aforementioned V-day.. but also because so much.. much delayed stock is finally rolling in. The supply line crisis is kind of ridiculous, not only are shipping costs astronomically high but the delays are crazy. One container of incense (normally 4 to 5 weeks shipping) is now four a half months in transit. What the hell is going on?

Gosh.. sorry to rant. These days it is hard work being an importer or comes to that.. an exporter. Which (big sigh) brings me to the fact that we have finally reluctantly reached a point where we had to make a sad and difficult decision. And so I have a statement to make.. see below.

Last week I was telling you about the ONE important thing never to forget in any business and especially the gift trade if you want to grow and succeed.. if you missed it you can recap here.. 

Ok deep breathe. We fought against this for a long time, but inch by bloody inch we have been slowly losing the damn battle. There was a time when our sales to the EU were more than half of our sales. Our French, German, Polish and Italian websites were booming.. growing 30% a year.  Every week truck loads of British made aromatics products, plus our Indian and Indonesian imports flowed across the channel and found their way to thousands of European gift shops. Creating and sustaining lots of jobs in our marketing office, the warehouse and the aromatics factory. Sadly as you know Brexit happened, and even though we put our best brains on the problem and devised cunning plans to overcome the obstacles.. bit by bit the inevitable happened. The EU customers that used to love us gradually became disillusioned with the long transit times, the unexpected taxes, the complicated paperwork, the VAT to pay and reclaim.  They started giving us bad reviews.. sales growth reversed.. and nothing we could do could save the day. 

David