2012: A vintage year

We have had a great 2012 but due to us honeymooning over Christmas, we are a little late with our blog round up of the year. Thanks for everyone’s support last year, to our customers who have made it our best year yet as well as family and friends who have listened, advised and made us smile x

January

We started the year by taking on our first member of staff. We decided we needed some help with processing stock as we were buying but not getting it online fast enough. So along came Courtney who gets us organised and ensures we list over 30 items online each week. This has meant our sales increased which makes us very happy!!

January was a tough month for me personally as I was quite sick with a stomach ulcer. As a result I had to stop drinking caffeine and booze which gave me a lot of clarity and time to plan the year. This was a good thing…..2012 was great!

February

We took the show on the road in February visiting towns we hadn’t even been to before. We travelled up north with Judy’s Affordable Vintage Fair selling at Durham, York and Leeds as well as our usual towns.

We started the month at Spitalfields and met the Homes and Antiques team who featured us on their website.

We also started selling furniture on a larger scale with Mr YVL taking over this side of the business. It has now become a core part of our strategy so expect lots more teak in 2013.

March

Our stock was featured in Homes and Antiques magazine and made it to the front cover.

We sold at our first 2 day Antique Fair in Peterborough. It was very cold but we had a great time, both buying and selling. Cath Kidston came to see us for the first time buying our entire stock of vintage pinnies which I had been collecting for years.

April

Our Easter article was printed in Vintage Life magazine, all about how to have a vintage easter!

May

We announced that we are getting married later in the year and sent out our invites. This resulted in a lot of our time and energy being focused on planning a DIY wedding that was only 3 months away.

We sold some great vintage bits for the Jubilee in June including this lovely dress.

This 1950s kitchen set was sent to Hyde Park to be used in one of the Jubilee celebrations.

We started our series of articles called Get the Look for Vintage Life magazine. This started with the 1950s and has become one of most read blog posts.

 

We also traded at our first local fair: The MK Handmade and Vintage Fair. Doing one that is up the road was great and it was fab to meet our local customers and put faces behind the names of people we chat to through Facebook.

June

We ran our mobile vintage tea room for charity, here in our village. Local ladies baked cakes for free and we served them on our vintage china. The flags that we hung up were from the 1940s/50s.

We all went down to Brighton for the first Vintage Nation festival. We sold tonnes of retro homewares…but boy was it cold!

July

This was spent mostly panicking about our wedding.

In between this we hired out lots of china for parties, freaked out about the weather (We were due to get married in a meadow under a tree)….and featured in Pretty Nostalgic magazine.

Our guide to creating a 1950s picnic article was published in Vintage Life magazine.

 

August

We got married! It was perfect, the sun shone and it was a home made 1950s affair. It was such a great day with wonderful friends around us.

I turned 40 and got married again (legally this time), and wore 1960s John Bates.

Our stock was featured in the Homes and Antiques room set at the Vintage Festival.

We traded again at the fab Twinwood festival here in Bedfordshire. We were again next to Freddies at Pinewoods…and they bought some 1950s tub chairs from us!

September

We went back on the road again selling both clothing and furniture around the country.

Our Norwegian cookware was featured in Homes and Antiques magazine and even made it into their 2013 calendar.

Plus I announced that I am writing a book. It’s due out next year and will be available to buy here in the UK and US on Amazon as well as some shops too. It’s called Style Your Modern Vintage Home: a guide to buying, restoring and styling vintage. So I am busy writing it now (which is why we’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front as of late) and it will be due out in August 2013.

Our Herbie started school which was a huge milestone for us. It only seems like seconds ago that he was born….

I was invited to London Fashion Week’s first vintage event…amazing cocktails, great fashion and a sore head the next day!

We set up a 1950s kitchen room set at the Festival of Vintage in Epsom. We really enjoyed showing it so we are repeating this next year.

We launched our new website called Vintage Bedford and MK: a local guide to all things vintage and retro in the county. While in its infancy we have had a great response…so thanks and watch this space!

October

We met Paloma Faith while selling our retro furniture at the Vintage Home Show. A few emails later she agreed to write the foreword to our book……this is so exciting…..I cant wait to see it!

We were also featured again on the Homes and Antiques website

We sold at lots of other venues and really buckled down to listing like crazy online. We had our best month ever….no wonder I’m tired now!

We hit 2000 likers on Facebook. Our marketing strategy was to hit 5000 on all social networking sites and we managed this 2 months early!

November

I started writing like crazy………….and thats about it!! The book advance was due in this month and I even managed to beat the deadline by a week!

December

The Clothes Show Live was so so busy…..we had a great time selling our young vintage fashion. We featured some happy customers on the blog.

 

We shut up shop for the first time in 3 years and went on holiday over Christmas. I reckon after this year it was well deserved!

I hope you all had a great Christmas and all have a fab 2013.

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