It is a surprisingly busy morning here at Lello as we count down the hours till 1pm when we close for Christmas.
My children are tucked up snug at home with their dad, no doubt with the TV on far too loud!! We have had a couple of last minute shoppers in buying jewellery! and just franked a pile of post to send off.
Melanie is still working away on jewellery samples for Autumn/Winter 2010 now and Julie is continuing packing cards and making up orders, which will dispatch on 4th Jan on our return.
I have remembered to pop a roll of cellotape into my handbag to take home with me just in case I run out tonight and I am pleased with myself that I have not succumbed to eating the chocolates on my desk, yet.
Lastly I’d like to share this website with you, jovonnalondon.com. These people had a stand next to us at the recent Clothes show exhibition and I bought 1 of their dresses so too did 2 of my colleagues. If you like something pretty, ‘shortish’ floaty and cute then keep an eye on their website and their sale items. Their dresses are just lovely and fit anyone from a size 6/8 to a 14, and a bit more!! I wore one of the dresses I bought from them to an evening at a friends house last night and I received so many comments about my ‘little black dress’ and of cause when I said I only paid £25 for it, I had to sing the praises of the clothes show.
I appreciate there might not be many dresses on-line at the moment but all I can say is that they have a vast range, many are seen on celebrities in the tabloids and they are fantastic value.
When I find the details of another dress company I found at The Clothes show I will post that on the blog to, as I ended up with 3 dresses in total and the last one I bought from a company called ‘Magenta’ (no luck finding their website yet) is my most favourite and just as good value!
OPEN FOR BUSINESS AGAIN ON MONDAY 4TH JANUARY!
MERRY CHRISTMAS from us all at Lello xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
New Spring Season jewellery, cards and albums will be uploaded onto our site at the end of January. Karen
There was I thinking I had everything covered, doing my Christmas shopping in Sept and Oct but as it happens I have forgotten a few things like we all do. Thankfully I still have today as I will not be venturing near any shops tomorrow, absolutely not!
We are still quite busy here at Lello and have our little Christmas buffet to look forward to later.
I will take some photos of us and upload them this afternoon. It was my job to do the sandwiches and I am afraid I have cheated and bought them from M&S, sure they will be much nicer than if I’d made them!
We are madly putting together our agents sample boxes which should have gone out earlier in the week but as with most years they take much longer than you expect them to. But I am pleased we have managed it before Christmas this year and not the usual mid January.
This way our agents which have pictures of all our new jewellery ranges for Spring Summer to start selling to their customers and samples of our new handmade card ranges.
Off quickly now to the shops to buy my last two ‘small’ presents,
Karen
My last blog for 2009 will be tomorrow as we close for the week of Christmas and re-open on Monday 4th January.
Hi, I have taken a film of Melanie and Karen today, showing you the jewellery they are wearing.
Melanie is wearing our matching set Florence and Rosa, grey multi strand necklace and bracelet, £17.00 and £8.00.
Karen (D) is wearing our Ella, seed bead and charm necklace with matching Zoe bracelet, very pretty. These two lines will go into our sale which starts on Christmas Eve.
We are all counting down to Christmas. We still have mail orders coming through so those are being speedily sent off. I have just discovered from an aerial engineer who’s come to retrieve the Ariel from the children’s TV here at Lello, that when our roof was repaired in July that the leaking hole was covered by 2 pieces of 4×2 and a scraping of cement! You just don’t know do you? so I am now trying to contact the roofing firm who are very reputable to arrange for them to come back out to ‘redo’ the job, meanwhile the ceiling in the gents loos has started to crack with the damp from the roof….. it just gets better.
Will upload our last ‘what are we wearing at Lello today’ tomorrow for 2009! I’ll make it a special one! Karen
As yet we don’t have much snow here but I think it’s coming……
It has been freezing cold here in the office at Lello and it is only just starting to warm up now with the heating on full blast.
We are getting a last minute rush on card and album orders from a number of our retail customers which we are doing our utmost to get made and sent out so the shops get them before Christmas. Some customers like to make sure they have things to fill their shelves with once Christmas is over. It would appear that everyone wants wedding and baby albums!!
I have also had numerous requests from members of the public wanting to order our Kingdom corsage. This line sold out while we were at the Clothes Show and is just one of those lines which has proved to be incredibly popular, my apologies to those of you who have not been able to get your hands on one before Christmas.
Meanwhile I sit at my desk with my Ugg boots on and my hands wrapped round a hot mug of tea!
We awoke to snow here in Leicestershire but it was very short lived. We have had more since but none of it has settled.
It is a quiet Thursday here at Lello, Scott has been in from the Freight forward company we use down south and very kindly dropped off a box of a dozen bottles of wine. Our husbands will be very pleased! Our paper supplier has been in with some new diaries… we do use them and my parents came in with a box of chocolates for us all, needless to say the box is now empty. It all adds to the Christmassy feeling.
I have written my Christmas cards to all my colleagues and will wrap up a little pressie for them all when no one is watching!
Meanwhile we have spent the past few days having a complete stock take which isn’t fun as the warehouse is freezing cold. So I now have the long arduous task of imputing all the figures.
We like to have a good sort out and clear up before Christmas to make sure everything is set for next season, all our agents new samples go out next week so they can hit the ground running in January.
I have quickly snapped a picture of Karen and Mel working out all the costs on the new Spring Summer jewellery designs and Fiona who is putting together the last of our agents samples of our new handmade card ranges which will also launch in Feb 2010. Lello has nine agents who sell their products around the UK into independent retailers, from Narborough Hall in Enderby, Leicestershire to Proposals in Stirlingshire.
Lello has manufactured handmade cards for 11 years now and amongst our own brand we have designed Finest cards for Tesco and card packs for Monsoon / Accessorize together with designs for Lakeland and WHSmith to name a few, so the jewellery lines are relatively new for us.
We chose to remove all the handmade card designs from the website a month or so ago as we felt there was just too much on there and it was confusing for our customers.
In 2010 we will start re-loading our new lines of handmade cards in a much ‘easier to shop’ format for the general public to buy online alongside their jewellery purchases. We have something for everyone from hen night cards to wedding, baby and birthday and more….
All our cards are made on site here in the UK using recycled board and compostable poly bags.
The general public can buy our cards in bulk for Weddings, Engagements, Baby announcements, Moving house and other special occasions.
I have picked on my colleague Karen this morning for our ‘What are we wearing at Lello today’.
Karen is working her way through the last few designs for Spring Summer just double checking the quality, name and details so I asked her to put on one of the new sets to show our growing number of blog readers.
This lovely new line is called Adele (bracelet) and Lyla (necklace) they follow in the footsteps of our very popular metal antique finish jewellery with quite chunky beads for dramatic look.
We love it, I think this is a style we will all be wearing when the new ranges launch in February 2010! Keep an eye out for our sale page which will be uploaded on Christmas Eve!
It’s not a pleasant day today outside so I am reluctant to leave the office apart from picking the children up from school.
We have lots of lovely pre-production samples here to go through this afternoon for the new stock we are expecting in for Spring Summer so I am looking forward to that as for me it’s a bit of light relief!! I will post a few pics of them later in the week.
For now I am going to concentrate on keeping warm as this big building of ours is freezing at this time of year!! Karen
