I hope everyone in the UK enjoyed the festive long weekend.

Last week I was in Slovakia at our new warehouse not only to celebrate a successful relocation, but it turned out to celebrate the 5th Birthday of AWGifts. More below.

I was telling you about the crazy turbulent economics of Turkey and some opportunities that might come out of that.. if you missed it you can catch up here.

Lots of opportunities in Turkey and so we made lots of connections and negotiations starting on several fronts.. we absolutely need to go back soon to finalise deals. So we made a plan, meanwhile I needed to head home to Spain and Raul (our IT wizard) needed to go home to Kuala Lumpur.  Tomas drove us to Vienna airport, where I took a Wizz air flight down to Malaga and Raul Turkish airways to Asia. It was smooth as it could be, the flight was full but no queuing at all. I checked in online, printed my own baggage tag by scanning a barcode on the phone, dropped it on a belt and went to the gate. This Hungarian budget airline is really going places. According to the onboard magazine they now fly to Abu Dhabi, and from there to Sri Lanka. Wow, so now you can actually fly a budget airline to Asia. 

So Jubilee Celebrations in the UK kick off with HRM and Paddington Bear.. so delightfully British. Seventy years is a long time to do that job, in Slovakia AW celebrates 5 years, with a move to a new warehouse and a birthday cake.Tomas and I made speeches and we thanked everyone for their hard work.  It was immediately after that Brexit vote in 2016, when we figured that it was time to get started inside the EU. I used to joke that Slovakia is in the middle of nowhere but in fact it's perfect for distribution in Europe.. Slovakia has easy access to 13 countries. And it seems in five years that lots of companies made the same choice of location. When we came it was difficult to find a suitable warehouse. Now the whole area is a distribution hub with massive warehouses on big new hi-tech business parks. And they are building like crazy.. it's all changed so much in 5 years. It seems like this is where the action is.