Coraline - Organic SPF, candles and treatment room

Dear everyone,

We hope you are doing really well.  You may have already seen the news that we are closing our shop in Topsham, and our final day is tomorrow.  You can read a little more below for further details but we just wanted to thank you so much for supporting our Crowdfunder last year. We are continuing online, and this is going very well. 

Topsham shop closing

When we last sent an update in September we had shaped up our beautiful treatment room at our Topsham shop, thanks to all your support, and Amanda had been delivering her treatments since June. The plan was that the treatment room would help keep the overheads of the shop sustainable.

Amanda received glowing reviews for her treatments. We are so happy and proud we created the treatment room, made possible by all your support. In the end, as the months have gone on, we saw a bigger picture that, in fact, keeping the shop itself on, was no longer financially viable, and the treatment room just wasn't enough to make it work. We are so grateful to the shop and all it's brought us but the footfall has not been enough to keep it sustainable. What it has enabled us to do over a period of four and a half years, however, is to build a very strong customer base online, so we are continuing our business online, and are excited about doing that. It is a very positive picture for us if we become online only. And so I am writing this email the day before we close our shop fully.

Sunscreen update

Back in September, Kevin took on extra Consultancy work as well as running our business so as to keep everything viable and going. This meant he had less time to develop the sunscreen, which we had hoped to have ready for you this Spring. But I suppose one thing we have learned running our business, is that we can have expectations but sometimes things don't pan out that way. And one thing Kevin is very good at doing is adapting in response to that. So we have high hopes for our business once it's fully online with one local market a month, and a few other events. And high hopes that Kevin will now be able to phase out doing extra work on the side, and will be able to have the time, headspace and funds required to devote to developing the sunscreen.  It remains his clear goal to develop it.  We apologise for the delays on it for those of you who selected it as your reward.

If you have selected sunscreen as your reward - either waiting or select different reward

We don't have an exact timeframe on the sunscreen so if you're willing to hang on for whenever that may be, and the gift of the unexpected when it arrives in the post, great. 

Please reply to this email if you would like us to organise an alternative reward for you which you can receive straight away (e.g. a candle, or some of our existing skincare), or if you would like your money back. 

The candles have been a joy to realise, thank you. The packaging is beautiful by Louise on the team, and we are so happy with the purity of the candle Kevin created.

Thank you

Our team has been amazing. We are very grateful to them for all their positive input to our change in direction. And Amanda has now found lots of regulars and will continue her treatments once a week on a Monday above Topsham chemist. So that is great and just shows how this might not have been what she pictured when she began with us, but is equally great.

I know we will all have had experiences where things didn't pan out as we'd imagined. And we have learned it's about what we do with that and how we choose to view it.  Whilst we may not have gone in the exact direction we thought we would, we are going strong and you gave us the support and platform to take the steps on our journey that have propelled us to building our business, albeit not in the timing or way we thought. We are excited for our next phase.

Best wishes, Liz and Kevin