Well, we did it. We opened our very first shop. Just so happens it’s on Carnaby Street (one of the busiest shopping streets in London). So it’s been a learning curve that’s for sure, a big scary steep one that we’re still scrambling up.

We’ve learned some stuff already, like how you can make nice fittings using only windfallen Pembrokeshire oak, like skimming the walls with lime render made from crushed glass (instead of dredged up sand), and finding out the hard way that paints which don’t contain nasty oil-based hardeners can take about three days to dry. The walls needed three coats, so that’s almost ten days watching paint dry. Zzzz.

We hit some other snags along they way too, like the fact that our tenancy agreement says we have to keep the lights on all night, which we thought a bit wasteful, so we came up with our own little solution to that one.

But, we’ve still got lots to figure out, and probably a lot more mistakes to make along the way.

Fingers crossed the customers come.