Frostastic Christmas events!

What an amazing few weeks it's been! 

First we exhibited to the Festive Gift Fair at the NEC and what a wonderful event that is.  It's so well organised and the atmosphere was just lovely with live bands and local choirs filling the hall with beautiful music.  The Nutcracker soldier on stilts, Father Christmas and pantomime dames were a big hit with the children....and made us laugh when they paid our stand a visit too!!  There was a wide variety of things to buy, and the food and drink section was very mmm!!!  (Well, it would have been rude if we hadn't tried a few samples and made a few purchases for ourselves).



Natroma & The Natural Soapworks stand at the 2012 Festive Gift Fair, NEC

We loved meeting so many customers at the NEC - many existing and so many new!  It was wonderful that so many customers paid our stand a visit to wish us well and make a few purchases.  As you can imagine we recognise many names from the repeat orders we receive via our webshops, so it was lovely to get to say hello and advise on product selection and talk about aromatherapy in person.  Thank you so much, and we'll be back again next year.

At the workshop, the Ruskin Christmas Fair sounded like it was another very busy event!  Family members stepped into the breach, and opened the workshop  for us while we were away and did a fantastic job - somehow coping with larger than expected crowds, products that kept selling out and a till malfunction on the Sunday afternoon!  They coped so well, so we're very grateful for their ongoing help and support!

We returned from the NEC...exhausted but happy, and found quite a website order backlog which we somehow managed to turn around so everything was shipped out before we headed off to Attingham Park for the Frost Fair. 

We look forward to this event every year, so we really felt for the Attingham staff who were having to cope with parkland that's usually used for parking that was waterlogged due to the recent flooding.  But their fantastic efforts, and masses of protective matting saved the day!  We've just heard there were record numbers of visitors (nearly 14,000) over the 3 days with the Sunday being the busiest day at Attingham so far. 

So what a fantastic Frost Fair it was!  We had a huge corner stand in the main marquee again, and were amazed by the numbers of people who returned to stock up on their soaps and skincare, and buy Christmas hampers for friends and family who'd specifically requested some more of "that lovely soap" again!  It does wonders for our egos, to hear customers raving about the products, our ingredient quality, and the beautiful packaging and how well last years gifts were received...they aren't on commission, honest!    We're really sorry that we sold out of so many hampers and the Christmas Spice oil on the Sunday - but rest assured, we're back now and will get the elves to make some more!

So once again, thank you everyone for being so kind, supportive and understanding about the website delays and out of stock items.  Today, our shop re-opens at 12pm and we'll hurriedly try to get things back to normal.  Again there is a big website order back-log, but we'll begin to prepare as many orders as we can today so they can be shipped out from tomorrow onwards.  Things should be completely back to normal by the weekend....fingers crossed!