It feels slightly ridiculous talking about Christmas when autumn has only just arrived.
But for a small business like ours, Christmas starts much earlier than you might think.
Over the last few days we’ve been working on packaging ideas for this year’s Christmas gifts.
That means testing boxes, trying different combinations of jars, working out how everything fits and deciding whether something that looked good in our heads actually works once it’s sitting on the kitchen table.
Sometimes it does.
Quite often it doesn’t.
The bit you don't normally see
By the time a Christmas gift appears on the website, everything hopefully looks fairly straightforward.
A box.
A few jars.
Maybe a bottle.
Nicely packed and ready to send.
But before that comes quite a lot of experimenting.
This was some of our testing this week.
Nothing particularly glamorous just us working through ideas until something starts to feel right.
Why we have to start now
There are a few reasons we can’t leave this until December.
We need to know which packaging works.
We need enough jars ready.
We need herbs grown, dried and made into salts.
We need labels, boxes and packing materials.
And, most importantly, we need to know that what eventually arrives at someone’s door feels like a proper gift rather than a few products put into a box at the last minute.
When you make things in small batches, there isn’t really a shortcut.
Making something we'd actually give
That’s probably the test we keep coming back to.
Would we be pleased to give this to someone ourselves?
If the answer is no, we keep working on it.
So while Christmas still feels a long way off, the preparation has already started here.
We’ll show you the finished result when we’re happy with it.
For now, this is the bit before the polished photographs, cardboard, jars and plenty of trial and error.