Betsy Benn Home and Gift Blog

Well, HELLOOOOO Spring! This week has been just glorious hasn't it? A little sunshine just makes everything feel a lot more possible...

Yep, that was true when I started writing this email last week. However, today, as I'm putting the finishing touches to this email, I'm back in thermals with the log burner at full blast and a dusting of snow in the garden. Ah, Spring in the UK, how we love thee. 

Wrap up warm / bring out the flip flops!*   

I'm still a little bit in love with our wooden flowers and now my mind is all a-buzzing with new ideas and applications.

We're working on wooden flower bunting - maybe in birth flowers - definitely in daisies, roses, peonies, and dahlias. I'm thinking it will make a beautiful, letterbox-friendly gift and will be just the right size for draping across a large mirror, along the edge of a shelf, anywhere that needs a little lift.

I also mocked up this mini bunting daisy chain. It would have been a cute token gift for Mother's Day, but apparently, there are only 24 hours in the day, and all the imagining I like won't change that. The mini bunting would be great on a desk, maybe across a screen, or over a picture frame. What do you think? I'd love to know where you would put it.

I recently stumbled across this and it's one of those rare discoveries that needs sharing and sharing - so here I am, sharing! 

This is Martyn Stewart. he grew up in Birmingham and used to record the blackbirds singing in his garden, aged 11. Fast forward five decades and he's one of the most prolific audio naturalists around, having amassed over 30,000 hours of audio from over 50 countries. His work has been used in over 150 movies, and hundreds of documentaries and podcasts. 

Stewart was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer last year and has released 200 soundscapes, free of charge to the public, to inspire conservation and give a voice to the animals. His project - The Listening Planet - has me hooked. It knocks spots off any meditation app. I've only been to one of the places in this library, Costa Rica, and the sounds transported me back in an instant. I highly recommend a listen.

Read more about him here.

We've stayed close to home this last month, but nonetheless travelled around the sun one more time and, BOOM - Betsy Benn the business is suddenly 12 years old! 

I really needed to celebrate our 12th birthday, I think we all did actually! We had plans to "have a bit of a do" on our 10th birthday, but, lockdowns happened. So we are going big for our 12th. We had cake and silliness in the studio on the actual day, and an actual in-person party is planned for June.

We sent out birthday boxes to our top 100 customers that included personalised notebooks, a Betsy branded chocolate bar (thank you Quirky Chocolate), a key ring and gorgeous copper star print. Did you get one? I'd love to know what you thought. 

The very lovely Emma Jackson Photography asked me to write a blog post about all things business, and I knew immediately what I wanted to share. My year so far has been about 50% Christmas focused and some people think that's wild! Even some retail pals think it's a bit, well, out there. Read on for why you should be doing it too and one of my top tips.

On 6^th January I wrote and scheduled the three emails I knew I was definitely going to send this Christmas. The first was an out of office/we’ve left the studio/Merry Christmas to all kind of thing. The second was a “last orders today” email, and the third was “one week to go until last orders”. It’s what my business mentor, Jenny Pace, calls low hanging fruit and it’s a brilliant strategy when you have a deadline event like Christmas. Working backwards somehow makes it easier.

But why in January?

If you’re a small maker with a retail gift-based business, it’s likely that Q4 is where you do most of your selling, most of your marketing and most of your making. Depending on the year, Betsy Benn has ranged between 32-45% of our whole year’s turnover in those last three months, so it makes sense to spend between a third and half of my time across the year planning for the best possible festive trading season.

The absolute best thing about Christmas for maker sellers is its predictability. As we will doubtless have all moaned when a customer places an order on the 22^nd and wants it to arrive the next day “Why leave it so late, they know Christmas is on the SAME DAY every year”. Well, us makers know it’s coming too, so we have this amazing opportunity to plan.

And while we say it’s about Q4, October is definitely a slow burn, with sales not really picking up pace until after the late half term, possibly not even until after Halloween or Bonfire night, so you can compress Q4 down into about sixty full days of trading.

Sixty days, where your customers are actively looking for the beautiful solutions you have for them.

Sixty days, when you don’t really want to be trying to write product descriptions and emails and creating reels all the time.

Sixty days when you really just want to be saying “here are my beautiful wares, thank you for your custom” or variations on a theme.

Sixty days when you don’t want to be working all the hours god sends in your business, leaving you exhausted or ill, and unable to enjoy your own Christmas.

That’s assuming that you COULD even throw all your waking hours into your business for that time and don’t have, oh, a family, a spouse, pets, and friends that are all important to you and need your time and love. You also have to look after your own physical and emotional health so you can keep trading in January, and be ready for Valentines Day and Mother’s Day etc

And you might also need to make the odd meal so you don’t starve.

But break those sixty days down between January and September and you’re looking at just under seven days per month. A month to write seven days’ worth of Christmassy social media content, a month to film seven reels (if you want to do a reel a day which I think is a bit excessive), a month to write one newsletter (if you want to send one a week) – you can see where I’m going with this.

Which is why we started in January!

It’s not just content that needs to be written, it’s everything of course. Identifying gaps in your product range, sourcing supplies, creating new products, working out costings, photographing products, listing them on your eCommerce sites, outsourcing jobs you can’t do, adding temps to your team – the business list is kinda endless and we haven’t even got to the family list or the self-care list. And maintaining focus on something that seems so far away and has so much in it, well, it’s hard!

Accountability

I was already pining for some kind of accountability group around Christmas prep. For a start, I didn’t want to be the only odd sock (or stocking) in the laundry basket, working on Christmas in isolation. I wanted other odd socks to join me! But there is also nothing like a supportive community to bounce ideas around with, share highs and lows with, or just sit and have a coffee with. I’ve been asked so many times over the past 13 years what advice I would give to anyone starting their own business and it’s always the same. Find someone else starting their own business and hang out with them. No-one understands your journey quite like someone else on the same path.

All that’s to say, when Jenny Pace asked if I’d like to run a Christmas accountability group within her Better Business Collective while she was on maternity leave, I jumped at it! We agreed I’d also open it up to the informal notonthehighstreet facebook group I’m a part of, as not every business in the Collective has such a big Christmas focus and I wanted there to be more than three of us on the monthly zooms I was planning! As it turned out, I wasn’t the only odd sock at all. There were lots of us who wanted to get a handle on planning in this way, so many in fact that we had to limit the numbers we could have on the live calls, with the rest of the group accessing the recordings after the event.

And of course, it was joyous! We covered A LOT of topics. One of my favourites was May’s monthly zoom where we looked at dealing with the stress, resting and refueling during peak trade. It’s an emotive topic and everyone had memories of times they’d not been able to manage the stress, but also tips on how they look after themselves now and the sharing was just so beautiful. As is often the way when you’re creating a presentation, the flow of information can feel one way, but when others receive it the pathways open up and it flows right back to you!

There were some incredibly practical sessions too, and I’m going to share this one with you so you can get a heap of social content out of one piece of writing.

Take your current best seller, or a good selling item you want to promote, and write out the answers to these questions;

• What is it?
• Where did the inspiration come from?
• When did you first design it?
• Are there any special skills or processes required?
• What is it made from?
• Was there anything tricky to overcome when making?
• What tweaks did you make to get it just right?
• Why do people buy it?
• How do people use it?
• Who had the first one (maybe you made it as a gift for a friend)?
• What problem does it solve?
• What emotions does it tap into?
• Any memorable orders or feedback?
• When did it become your best seller?
• How have you developed it since launch?

Put in as much detail as you can, and then go back and make sure you have as many key terms in this long form copy as possible. Anytime you have written ”it’s”, please change that to a key search term if you can.

What you have just written is a blog post. You can either keep the questions in, or add some sentences between your answers to create a flow. Here’s an example of where I did this for our travel memory print.  

Now you can take some extracts from this blog post and turn them into a newsletter or two. You might want to highlight the inspiration story. Or pull out why xxx is such a good gift for xxx.

And in the same week social posts might look like this:

Day 1 – This week we’re throwing a spotlight on one of our favourites… Here’s the creation story.

Day 2 – These are some features/benefits. This is how you could gift this product. It’s really popular with xxx kind of person.

Day 3 – Here’s a BTS of us making this product. Here’s why we still love it.

Day 4 – An anecdote about a standout order for this product.

Day 5 – Customer X bought this for xxx, here’s what they said about it. This kind of feedback makes us feel…..

Day 6 – seeing photos of our product out in the wild makes us feel …. It inspired the creation of this spin off. The features of which are xxx

Day 7 – we’ve loved deep diving on this product, if you want to read more about it head to the blog post here.

A reel of this product being made or packaged or unwrapped would be a lovely addition. Or if you can show footage of anything that inspired it, that would also be lovely.

I chose to publish the blog post I wrote like this back in February because the product I was writing about is not just a Christmas product. But every other piece of connected content is already created and will be published in November to push Christmas sales. And obviously, you can take this formula for three or four products and vary it slightly!

But it’s not January anymore!

If you’re feeling inspired to get some Christmas content written but have a mild panic setting in that it’s not January anymore – panic not. The brilliant Jenny is running her spectacular Christmas Marketing In A Day workshop on Friday 22^nd September. It’s everything you need to supercharge your Christmas content plans.

Even if you can’t be there in person, the whole thing will be recorded so you can catch up whenever you like.

A final thought.

We all get that voice in our heads that asks if marketing sometimes is, well, a bit much. Maybe we question the value of the things we’ve made. Or compassion in this time of economic uncertainty makes us feel like quietening our voices.

But please know this.

Our ideal customers want to give meaningful gifts to their loved ones. From about late October the colder darker nights will do something to everyone’s inner core and make them want to bring colour, light and joy into their homes.  With Christmas, Diwali, and Hannukah all falling in Q4, love, actually, will be all around. And they don’t want to pour money into the hands of Jeff Bezos and crew any more than you do. Your customers are actively looking for you, so show them what you have and let them decide if they want to make a purchase.

When you’re buying a personalised notebook as a gift for a milestone birthday, a present for a teacher, or as a treat to yourself, there are lots to choose from. 

At Betsy Benn, our bespoke notebooks and custom journals feel so much more luxurious than your average notebooks. That’s because they’re laser engraved in our Cotswolds studio, to feature hand-drawn or typographic designs created by our founder, Betsy. Or – even better – they can feature designs created by you! That’s right, we can engrave your personalised notebook with your child’s drawing, some special handwriting, or a business logo.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be an avid collector of notebooks and journals. Of course, there’ll be some notebooks you’re saving for best (i.e., you have zero intention of ever using them!). 

That new notebook smell!

But, for the ones you do want to write in, there’s nothing like cracking open the cover for the first time, taking a deep inhale of that wonderful new notebook smell (surely there’s a word for that? Scriptaroma? Papernoscent?), feeling the smooth paper inside and wondering what the heck you’re going to write on those beautifully clean pages. 

But notebooks are made to be written and doodled in! So, if you’re planning on buying a beautiful personalised notebook from Betsy Benn – whether for yourself or as a gift to a friend, partner or colleague – here are 20 ideas of how you can use it.

Use your personalised notebook for journaling

There’s been a growing trend for journaling recently, and it’s easy to understand why. Far more than merely recording the events of your day as you would in a diary, keeping a journal allows you to write down your feelings, ideas and observations. Journaling is an intimate process, which is great for exploring and reflecting on your emotions. It can also be a helpful, healing way to support you through stress, anxiety, depression or medical treatment.

That’s why our And Breathe journal is so perfect for self-gifting or as a present for someone you know who is going through a hard time. Personalised with a name and available in a range of jewel-like colours (the mustard is my personal favourite), the And Breathe notebook reflects that feeling when you catch a moment to yourself, or you come home after a tough day and collapse on the couch. 

Take a deep breath, reset yourself, get all of your thoughts down on paper and exhale. Let go. Encouraging you to let your feelings take flight, the tactile vegan leather notebook cover is laser engraved with a flock of soaring birds, along with the words And Breathe, plus your personalisation: your name, or the name of the person you’re gifting the journal to. 

For even more inspiration, our Living Your Dreams journal is a beautiful, adaptable notebook which could be used to write affirmations as part of your manifesting practice, as a place to record your nightly dreams, or somewhere to write down your goals and life plans so you can start making them a reality. 

“Fantastic quality and a lovely gift. Very personalised and paper quality great.” (Rachel E, reviewer)

A journal for all of baby’s ‘firsts’

I don’t know about you, but my son is 16 and I’m still in the habit of recording his milestones (date of first GCSE exam, when he started shaving - that kind of thing!) on a never-ending note on my phone. When you have a newborn, it’s great to have a dedicated place to write down all of those firsts – their first bath, their first trip to the park, the first word they said, or how they’d say ‘futterdye’ instead of ‘butterfly’… Instead of storing those special moments in a place you’ll never see them, write them in a special place – a special personalised journal. This From Day One journal is the most thoughtful gift you could give new parents on the arrival of their newborn, or to celebrate an adoption. 

Expectant parents and pregnant mamas are often deluged with some pretty samey presents. So gift them something truly personal for their baby shower or blessingway, like Betsy Benn’s Bump, Baby and Beyond bespoke notebook. 

The best thing about these personalised baby notebooks? They can be gifted to the child once they’ve grown up! What an incredible, sentimental gift for your child to receive a book detailing important moments in their life on a special day like their 18th birthday, their wedding day, or the day they welcome their own first child into the world! Oh, I imagine there would be tears! 

A notebook to record life’s amazing moments

It’s been said that life is the greatest adventure, and it’s true – there are so many adventures to be had! Whether it’s for an outdoorsy couple on their wedding day, a student heading on their gap year or celebrating a graduation, or a retirement gift, our Adventure Is Out There personalised notebook is a great reminder that life is about collecting moments, not things. 

I always imagine this notebook being crammed with handwritten reflections on exciting adventures and achievements, along with physical memories like train tickets, boarding passes, Polaroid snaps and napkins from that magical beach bar where you sat with sundowners after a day making memories in an amazing new place… You can use this adventure notebook as a really special record of a really special time, something to look back on which will bring those memories and feelings flooding back. 

“A beautiful gift. My friend was delighted with it!” (Claire, reviewer)

A planning tool for your business

It’s all well and good having ideas of what you want to achieve in life, but handwriting those goals down in a beautiful personalised notebook really elevates your plans. It’s the same for business – every great business needs a plan! If you’re a business owner, or you have a friend who’s just founded their own venture, then our bespoke business logo notebook is exactly what you need. 

You can have your business logo laser engraved on the cover, and choose the notebook colour that best matches your branding. You can use it for quarterly or annual business planning, make a note of client wins (perfect to cheer you up on a low day!), journal on your achievements, challenges and lessons each month, or plan your social media content ideas.

“Such a good quality product and it worked really well as a gift, I couldn't recommend enough! I might end up getting myself one next.” (Conor F, happy notebook customer)

A personalised notebook for a special occasion

When your child draws you a special picture, don’t just stick it on the fridge to get tatty, or shove it in a drawer with the rest of them. Turning your child’s drawing into a practical, useful notebook is a great idea, and the perfect way to enjoy their cute artwork for longer. 

With Father’s Day coming up, name me a better gift than a personalised notebook for dad featuring their own child’s drawing... I can’t think of anything! This custom child’s drawing journal is easy to order, and makes the perfect present for grandma or granddad, for adoptive parents, or godparents. And there’s all sorts they can use it for – like day-to-day notes, a gratitude journal, lettering practice, a parenting journal… You could even ask your child to draw a special picture for their mum, dad, teacher or sibling so you can have it engraved on a Betsy Benn vegan leather notebook and gift it for a birthday, special occasion or even for going away to university. 

“Beautiful personalised notebook that arrived much earlier than expected, fantastic service that will allow me to give it to my friend for her 50th birthday at the weekend. Definitely recommend.” (Lesley, buyer)

With such a useful, beautiful collection of personalised notebooks available from Betsy Benn, why shop anywhere else?

How can I use my personalised notebook?

1. Journal your emotions and reflect on your feelings, write your daily gratitude list, or use it to look back at the end of each month, focusing on your achievements, challenges and lessons.
2. Write affirmations as part of your manifesting practice.
3. Record your nightly dreams – do you notice any patterns?
4. Write down your goals and life plans so you can start making them a reality. 
5. Keep a pregnancy journal, recording your growing bump, your feelings about your unborn baby, any useful advice you receive or positive birthing resources you love. 
6. Create a journal for all of baby’s ‘firsts’, or start a record book for your child’s, godchild’s or grandchild’s amazing milestones.
7. Plan your travels, next big trip or adventure.
8. Keep a diary or scrapbook of your days out and holidays.
9. Make plans for your retirement.
10. Record your experiences while at university or on a gap year.
11. Make plans for a big birthday – list ideas for 30 things to do when you turn 30, for example, or arrange your dream party.
12. Fill it with goals for your business, or use it to plan social media content ideas.
13. Keep a business diary and make a note of client or work wins, things that went well, and lessons you’ve learned – perfect to look back on if you’re having a low day or you’ve got the Sunday scaries! 
14. Use it as a keepsake family recipe book, saving handwritten versions of all those favourite family meals and specialities. 
15. Turn it into a book of all your to-do lists – better than having scraps of paper everywhere!
16. Use it for lettering practice.
17. Share your thoughts about your parenting journey… One day, you could have enough material to write your own book!
18. A leavers’ book for someone leaving school or work (filled with your classmates’ or colleagues’ memories!).
19. Journal on your experiences of going through medical treatment or chemo, for example. 
20. Create a reading log, keeping track and writing reviews of what you’ve read.

The traditional wall planner needed some Betsy magic that's for sure. Here's how our wall planner life used to play out, tell me if this resonates. You buy what you think is a BIG wall planner. It's been beautifully designed too, so it looks great on the wall. Then you write ONE THING on a day and, *poof*, no more space for anything else on that day.

Does that sound familiar?