I must be feeling emotional because I just had a little weep at an episode of Only Fools and Horses that I’ve seen a hundred times, but it really hit a nerve this time. We’re going through the wringer a bit at the moment… but as I type that I realise that it’s become the norm around here and it probably feels that way in your lives too. It seems like at a point somehow, life grabs you by the balls and just doesn’t let go.

I’m sitting in our living room with wallpaper hanging off the walls, holes in the ceiling and a mishmash of furniture we’ve acquired over the years (FYI: we’re renovating). To the right of the sofa I’m sitting on is what has come to be known as the ‘staging area’ (bonus points if you get that Friends reference) that is full of boxes, paperwork and some bits and pieces we bought “for the new house” that has yet to find a place. Don’t be fooled by the neat, curated life we all try to present online, it’s not at all like that day to day here.

Sitting here I feel just like Del-Boy and Rodney in that god awful flat – with a carpet and wallpaper that burns your corneas and boxes of hooky bits and bats all over the place – but for the first time tonight I also feel it’s charm. We’ve got a roof over our heads, full bellies and each other and oh we’ll have stories to tell when we’ve made it.

I think back to when I was younger and I’d watch Only Fools and Horses at my Dad’s in his half renovated house; My Dad has always been a bit of a dreamer too. When I look back over the years I don’t remember the expensive dinners, gifts or holidays as warmly as I remember huddling under a blanket with a freezing cold nose watching TV or climbing through a window at the top of the stairs to get into the new extension. I look at his big, perfect house now and feel a little bit like it lacks that ‘dreamer’ charm of his old place.

Del-Boy had it down:
“I always wanted to be a millionaire, Rodney. I always wanted a Rolls Royce, a big house in the country, jet off to the Caribbean and all that. But it’s not like I thought it would be, you know? All the dreaming and the scheming and the chasing and the trying… that was the fun part, you know. It was like dangerous, it was impossible.”

Here’s to the journey! Let us not forget to appreciate and remember it when we finally make it. This time next year we’ll be millionaires! Loves x xx

It’s almost funny to stumble across the #WhereWeStarted hashtag on Twitter this morning, as a little self doubt has been creeping in with me recently. It’s a great opportunity to look back at where I started Onetenzeroseven and more importantly why I started.

I do have a giggle when I look back at my very first product photos from Etsy. This is the first pair of earrings I ever sold. I remember at the time being so frustrated that my business wasn’t growing. Well, it wasn’t even moving! Looking back at my products from an SEO point of view and checking out the quality of my photographs it’s so clear and obvious to me now why my business took so long to become a success. My product titles were all wrong, there were no searchable keywords, my photos weren’t clear and the backgrounds were too distracting. I could write a book on it all.

I started selling jewellery because I discovered Etsy and found all the cute and pretty supplies you could buy to make your own stuff. I was working an office job and I badly needed an outlet for my creativity. I started listing what I made back on Etsy because I had too many pieces to keep for myself and I naively thought I could make some spending money for my upcoming holiday. How wrong I was!

At the very beginning I was sending out the few orders I had wrapped ever so carefully in tissue paper, loose in the bottom of a huge padded envelope. I eventually started branding myself with some handmade earring cards – oh you guys, those cards took me so long to make up! I only started using boxes when a lovely customer of mine told me her earrings, while beautiful, arrived in Australia with bent earring posts. Starting and running a business is such a steep learning curve, but you have to start somewhere and boy do you learn and change and develop along the way. Done is better than perfect, as I always say.

I’ve come such a long way since those days, learning to invest more money into my business and how valuable your own time is. There must be so much more I still have to learn, I learn new things every day and it will still never be enough. I will never have learned it all and I don’t want to. I want to learn something new every day.

Those rose earrings pictured above on my old handmade display cards are still one of my most popular products, though they’ve been updated a lot over the years with nickel free, stainless steel earring posts for sensitive ears and replacing those cheap butterfly backs with only the very best earrings backs I could find. I still use some of the very first supplies I ever bought too, with a little extra imagination thrown in making these earrings some of my best sellers as well.

Of course my business really started to take off when I started designing my own pieces to be made into jewellery instead of just using commercially available supplies. My very first collection was the Tea Lover range, as true to myself as I ever could be (I just love tea so much!), which remains my best selling collection to this day. I just love how much everyone loves a good cup of tea too!

Where did you start? Do you run a business or maybe write a blog? Did you go to university to start your career or did you find a really unusual way into your job? I’d love to hear your stories… and congratulations!! We’ve all come so far, we just need a little reminder and a walk down memory lane every now and then.

Loves x xx