Oh what a night!
I think it’s fair to say that our Christmas 2022 launch surpassed all of our expectations!
The most memorable sight of the whole night for me was the crowd that had lined up outside our shop, tailing all the way from our door and down the hill of Paget Lane.
I could not believe it when we opened our doors - to see such a strong and significant visual indication of support to Osbornes was overwhelming, and something that I can honestly say, will never leave me!
We had joked with Shauna at The Natural Beauty Pot about a queue on the night, but never in our wildest dreams did we think we would attract so many before we had even opened our doors for the launch night.
It’s so hard to believe that we haven’t been able to have a launch like this for 3 years.
Our business has changed so much in that time that even we needed to catch up with its pace!
We were naive enough to think that we would have time to intermittently announce our raffle prize winners throughout the course of the night, just as we had done during our Christmas launch in 2019.
But flash forward 3 years and last Thursday night we barely had the time to blink never mind announce raffle winners!
How lucky are we to have had such an incredible support from our customers.
And how lucky are we to have such a dedicated and hard working team.
Thursday night was the culmination of so much planning behind the scenes, dating back to the start of this year when Elaine and I began our buying for 2022.
We were disappointed with how things had gone in 2021. Not in terms of sales but in terms of our customer service, our merchandising and so many other aspects too.
There had been so many delays in deliveries and so many more variables riding against us last year that we were determined 2022 would be different.
When we started buying our stock, we immediately identified the key themes that we wanted to run with this year.
It remains to be seen whether that planning will pay off for us by the end of this Christmas, but hand on heart, I can honestly say that I have never felt prouder of Team Osbornes as I do now.
I feel that we are stronger than we have ever been and we have worked harder than we ever have to create something special in our shop this year, nothing (not even dodgy wifi and our till going up the left!!!) can get in the way of that!
Thank you so much to everyone who played a part in making our Christmas launch this year our best yet!
