So there we were in Harrogate, me and my beautiful assistant Tolu. She’d come down from Uni in Manchester to give me a hand on the first day. We hustled to the exhibition hall at some ungodly hour i.e 8am (I’m most definitely an owl, not a lark……), lugging all the decorative items my most excellent niece had brought from London on her way to Ripon. We then had two hours to turn this:

to this:

Yep, it was intense. How the poor girl didn’t end up chucking a jar of cream at my head as I ordered her around in military fashion, I will never understand. And those glass jars are heavy, I can assure you. As the doors opened at 10am, I was frantically trying to sync my swanky new Paypal card reader. There was a terrifying moment when my mind went completely blank and I couldn’t remember the Paypal password. I literally broke out in a cold sweat. In the end, I managed to reset it. Tell you what, that Elon Musk might be clueless about Space but he knows how to run a financial service. Now if we can only convince him to forget all that nonsense about electric cars and switch the beautiful Tesla to fossil fuels, we’d have a show! (Please don’t write in, I’m only teasing you. Fossil fuels, BAD!!! 🙂 )

The first day was really quiet and long, with the mostly elderly crowd who came on the Thursday treating the chance to try a new cream as a scam to lure them into selling their souls. I pretty much got bored with it within a few hours but stalwart Tolu kept on valiantly. The afternoon was better, and the coming days were pretty cool. My first sale was an absolute thrill – Palmarosa & Frankincense Facial Oil, since you ask 🙂 Even better was the feedback. I quote, ‘Oh, it’s just like Jo Malone’ and ‘My hands have never looked this good’ The trouble with online sales is that you don’t get that face-to-face interaction, so this was amazing. I’m afraid I’m now even more conceited than I was previously. C’est n’est pas possible, exclaim friends and family. And you know what I say to you? Not via a blog but feel free to fill in the blanks 🙂 I was so inspired that I took the step I’d been ruminating on, and opened a storefront on Amazon as soon as I came back. So, now we sell through Amazon. Our page can be accessed via https://amazon/alaraapothecary. Still time to get your Christmas orders in, here and on Amazon! There is still a ton of work to be done both here and there but it’s a really positive end to the year, thank God for all His blessings. It was just really nice to hear people oohing and aahing about the products, not to mention Tolu slathering herself in Rose Geranium*Vanilla body oil every five minutes. I suspect she was getting high on the essential oils, but have no proof. AlaraApothecary: happiness in a bottle. Have a terrific week, one and all.