Christmas arrangements

Now as we enter the final week before Christmas, we'd like to thank all of our customers for their valued support and custom during this busy pre-Christmas time. Rest assurred, we'll still be opening our Ruskin shop during the coming week (Tuesday to Thursday), with a shorter day on Christmas Eve (please see the opening hours to the right). So there's still time for local customers to visit us for last minute natural skin care gift hampers!

The website is still accepting orders, but it is now so close to Christmas (and the weather isn't helping) that we cannot guarantee delivery before Christmas. But for lower value orders received before midnight on 21 December, we will automatically upgrade the normal postage to 1st class (by Royal Mail) in the hope the parcels will be delivered by Christmas Eve. On larger value orders (over £50) received before midnight 22 December we will automatically upgrade to a next day courier service which should arrive in time for Christmas provided someone is available to sign for the delivery.

This year (for the first time since the company began) we will be taking an extended break over Christmas. We've been so busy, that we need to re-charge our batteries! The Ruskin shop will close at 12.30pm on Christmas Eve (the Cone shop is now closed), and will re-open again on Tuesday 11th January 2011. Website orders received from 23 December will begin to be processed from 5 January 2011. (So there's no problems with placing orders over the Christmas break, and they will be dealt with in the order they arrived). Due to the UK VAT increases, we will be revising the websites over the Christmas break with new prices effective from 4 January 2011.

So from all at The Natural Soapworks and Natroma Holistics, we'd like to again say thanks to our customers for their valued and loyal support. The move to new premises put us under a great deal of pressure this year, so your patience and understanding has been wonderful. We hope that everyone has a peaceful and restful Christmas, and a Happy New Year in 2011. Have fun!

Christmas Shopping Evening

We'll be open this Wednesday 15th December between 11am and 9pm.

We thought it might be useful for customers to have a late night shopping evening at our Ruskin Glass Centre shop, to stock up on last minute Christmas gifts! We'll have a range of special offers, Secret Santa ideas, natural skincare hampers, Christmas candles, fragrant Christmas decorations and more. So we hope to see you all on Wednesday!

We've also taken the decision to close our Red House Glass Cone shop for the next few weeks. Most people are now visiting our larger shop at the Ruskin, so it makes sense to have all of the stock available from one location.

Fantastic Frost Fair...but busy, busy!

We'd just like to say thank you to all of our customers, new and old, who visited our stand at last weekend's Frost Fair at Attingham Park. We had a wonderful time, and we were so pleased with the lovely feedback about our new range of pretty soap slice and botanical hampers! We hope the gift recipients enjoy using them.

But it's back to work again - visitors to both of our shops will find empty shelves at the moment! But don't worry, we're working around the clock to manufacture fresh bathing products and will have a selection of Christmas hampers available within the next day or so.

We also have a late night shopping evening planned for the Ruskin Workshop - so why not visit us on Wednesday 15th December for your last minute Christmas shopping. We'll be open between 11.00am and 9.00pm on that day, so hope to see you soon!

Christmas events and gift orders

Christmas is rapidly approaching now, and this means that we'll have reduced opening hours at our shops due to attending some Christmas Craft events. So we thought we should warn of the following closures:

Sunday 28th November - we'll be attending the Christmas Fayre at Hampton Manor in Hampton-in-Arden (for sat nav directions use postcode B92 0DQ).

Thursday 2nd to Monday 6th December - we'll be closed due to attending the Frost Fair at the National Trust's Attingham Park in Shropshire. The event runs between 3rd-5th December.

Internet orders will continue to be processed as normal. For Stourbridge customers, we've received lots of Christmas gift orders so it looks like we're going to be very busy in the coming weeks! Therefore we'll be closing our order book at the end of November, so there's just one more week to send in your order.

Red Cone Christmas Craft Fayre 20-21 November 2010

This coming weekend is the Red House Glass Cone's Christmas Craft Fayre. This marks the begining of the Christmas Festival, and Santa will soon be coming to the Cone each weekend in December.

So we'll be extending our opening hours in Studio 7 again (please refer to the opening hours on the right of this page), and will have a lovely range of natural skincare and goats milk soap Christmas gift hampers available to purchase or order in time for Christmas.

Please note, that this weekend we will not be opening our Ruskin shop.

Christmas is coming!

We've been a little quite on the blog in the last few week - it's because we've been so busy! We're settling into the Ruskin workshop very nicely, and visitors may well have noticed a certain Christmassy smell in the air. Yes, we've been blending our Christmas Spice essential oil blend again, and our natural Christmas decorations are now smelling wonderful and will be hung on the Christmas tree very soon!

So we've finally managed to upload some of our Christmas gift ideas onto the Natural Soapworks website. This year, we've expanded our range of naturally decorated recycled gift hampers - and they look very pretty without causing problems for the environment.

Mindful that times are still tough, we've also done everything we can to keep prices down so website customers will find a great range of hampers containing pretty hand decorated goats milk soap slices and botanical fizzing bath melts - all for under £10.

We're expecting the next few weeks to be very busy, as we prepare for a number of Christmas craft events. So website orders are currently being processed on a 2 day turnaround, and we will continue to post out hampers until the Christmas postal deadline is reached....or we run out of soap!!

Visitors to the Workshop, are advised to place their Christmas orders as soon as possible now - we're expecting to have to close our Stourbridge order book within the next week or so. We hope to see you soon!

Ruskin Glass Centre shop opens

The Natural Soapworks new shop at the Ruskin Glass Centre opened yesterday. We'd like to thank all of our loyal customers who called in to see us, and sent us good luck cards and flowers. We were really touched to receive so many good wishes, and it really made our day! We're still busy stocking the shelves and working on the unit, but here's a picture of how the shop area looked on the first day.

During the coming half term week we intend to open the Ruskin shop between 10am and 4pm on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This will coincide with the opening of the Ruskin Glass Centre's cafe, which will be offering a selection of complimentary cakes and coffee to visitors.

We're likely to be closed later in the week since we are re-fitting the Studio 7 shop, but local customers can ring our new telephone number (01384 399451) so we can advise on opening hours. We will also post an update on the blog, later in the week. We intend to re-open Studio 7 at the Red House Glass Cone on Saturday 30th October for the 'No Tricks, Just Treats' Halloween Funday. There will be no impact on website orders - these will be processed as normal.

The final thing to mention, is that the 2010 Christmas Catalogue is now available to local customers, to pre-order natural skincare Christmas gifts for collection from our Stourbridge premises during November and December. Many of these Christmas gift ideas will be uploaded to the website later this week.