Last week, I proofed the copy for the NOTHS Winter Gift Guide 2010 – and now, it’s just hit me that we’re in the last few weeks of preparation! Didn’t it just seem like 5 minutes ago that we were preparing for our Father’s Day feature in the Summer 2010 catalogue?

I know lots of my lovely fellow-NOTHS sellers are also in it and I’m getting excited to see find all our friends in the catalogue. I can’t wait for the Christmas orders to start flooding in (we’ve already had some, as early as August!).

How are everyone’s preparations going?

This is how I left my desk yesterday evening…approximately 200 Reindeer cards ready awaiting hand-cutting…

Ruby’s customers are the absolute best A lovely repeat customer of ours requested a bit of a customisation, and it turned out fantastically! She requested a customisation of our ‘Love Pigs’ design, featuring the bunny on our ‘Little Bunny’ card. Here’s the finished products – looks brilliant!

These will be available on NOTHS and here later today!

So, I told you about the cat-themed card I made my Mum last week and I’ve been trying to design a cat card for a little while…

Well…drumroll please!

Here’s the final ready-for-sale kittens! Part of our ‘Love’ range, these Love Kittens will be joining our Love Ducks, Love Pigs, Love Turtles and Love Birds. I LOVE these kittens…so sweet and simple. Well, I do love anything with a kitten on it, afterall!

Currently for sale on NOTHS: Click here but hope to add them to our homepage shop and our Etsy shop soon!

I thought I’d share one of our special new items for Christmas this year. I love that handmade gifting takes advantage of personalisation so here’s some of our lovely personal Reindeers!

These cards are made with Handmade, 100% Recycled Paper, Reindeer Poo and Christmas Tree Seeds. They feature handcut Reindeers (of course!) and can be personalised with adult and baby reindeers to reflect your own family. Choose up to 2 ‘parents’ and up to 4 ‘children’ to recreate your Christmas Family scene. These make great ‘From All Of Us’ cards for those special people in your lives! Perfect for grandparents, family friends and people who you think deserve something a little bit special at Christmas! And, don’t forget – these cards could grow your recipient a little Christmas Tree

They are currently available by clicking here.

Small Single Reindeer Cards are £3 each | Pack of 6 for £15

Large Family Reindeer Cards are £6 and can be customised

As I blogged last week about preparing for Christmas, I thought I’d keep you updated on what Ruby Wren is doing for Christmas! Even saying the word ‘Christmas’ makes me shudder right now.

I now have paper, big envelopes, small envelopes and enough packing envelopes to last me a long time! I still need to stock up on our lovely eco-friendly biodegradable cellophane for packaging and I want to reach my target of ready to post cards before the first drop of the NOTHS Winter Gift Guide. Can we do it? I certainly hope so! We were very shocked when we heard the sales forecast for the cards featuring in the notonthehighstreet.com catalogue.

How is everyone getting along with their planning for Christmas? Are you buying enough stock to reach your NOTHS forecasted sales, or will you purchase some and see how it goes?

I always like blogging about the evolution of Ruby Wren as a small business, the daily challenges we face and plans we have. August is no exception when it comes to ‘challenges’. For a card business, August is quiet from Father’s Day until the run-up until Christmas, but, we have big plans for this Christmas!

Following the success of the Summer 2010 notonthehighstreet.com catalgoue, I immediately signed up for the Christmas Catalogue. Due to the volume of catalogues which will be distributed this winter, it was an expensive decision, but one I leaped at. At the time, it felt like Christmas was miles away and that I had plenty of time to prepare our Christmas range.

But, oh my, how quickly time has flown! With the first drop of the catalogue due at the very start of October, we only have 1 month left to prepare. It’s a daunting prospect. And, Ruby Wren will be taking a few days off in September, so that’s even less time left to prepare!

Is anyone else preparing for Christmas? How are your plans going?

As a notonthehighstreet.com partner, we always look forward to anything special they have planned for customers and as of today, the Summer Sale has launched!

So many times I’ve  checked out the high street sales and have always been disappointed at the low-quality products from seasons past. Because at Ruby Wren, we want our customers to look forward to the sale and get something they really want, we’ve put CURRENT, BEST SELLERS in the sale! So, for a limited time, you can get something very good at even more of a bargain price!

The card packs are exceptionally good value anyway, so when you add a 20% discount, it’s even better value (a bargain indeed!!). You can choose from small 3-card packs and large ‘full’ 8-card packs in both the Simple 3D Butterfly design and the 3D Delicate Fluttering design, only at www.notonthehighstreet.com. Also included in the sale is the option to ‘upgrade’ the cardstock to our special growing seed paper!

Check out the Ruby shop at: http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/partners/rubywren/

Here in our little part of the world, Christmas has come early! The calendar of a Greeting Card business is always going to mean that we’ll be planning for special occasions months ahead of when you’ll be planning on buying cards for those occasions. Right now, I’m planning Christmas while the majority of the UK are probably thinking about summer holidays.

It seems a little surreal – while hand-cutting reindeers earlier, I found it hard not to hum ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’…and, in July, that might be considered a little bit strange to the outside world. But, I was so excited about my paper delivery this morning, I couldn’t wait to start on making for Christmas.

Ruby Wren has signed up for another of the Not On The High Street’s Catalogues. We’ll be featuring something special in the Winter and Christmas Gift Guides in October and November. After finding out how many cards we could expect to sell, it seems that starting work in July wasn’t soon enough! It’s a good job Ruby has amazing suppliers who got a huge batch of Christmas-themed goodies to me today so I can start making!

It’s really exciting to think that this is our first ‘proper’ Christmas. Last year, Ruby was still in the setting-up stages so I’m really excited to experience our ‘first’ Christmas.

It’s hard to believe how much things have developed over the last year. Last week I placed an order for a huge amount of paper – four times the amount of my last paper order. It just goes to show how things grow. I started off with a £10 paper order last year to make a few cards and kept reinvesting the profit. Now we’re investing in the Not On The High Street Gift Guides…and I’m sure other NOTHS partners will understand what a commitment that is. Little ideas do blossom

Here’s a quick snap of just part of my latest order…it didn’t stay packaged up for much longer after this was taken – I just couldn’t wait to get started!

Phew!!

Ruby Wren has just about finished with her Father’s Day orders for 2010. If you read previous blog posts or follow us on Twitter, you may have seen that we were in the notonthehighstreet.com Summer 2010 Catalogue.

It was amazing to be included and even more amazing to be making so many cards for customers (and their dads!). In the three weeks running up to Father’s Day, following the launch of the catalogue, I’ve not stopped hand cutting ‘Dad’ and ‘Daddy’ into Elephant Poo! What a brilliant response we had!

I’d like to thank everyone for their support over the last few weeks…despite the Summer Catalogue Campaign running until July, we featured our Father’s Day card so our work is about over for now that the ocassion is almost here. I was working upto 16hr days to keep up with demand, so I’ll be resting my very sore and blistered hands now that our orders are up-to-date and then getting started on Christmas! I already have some fab festive ideas and a few special things from our 2009 range will be coming back.

Wishing everyone and their Dads a great weekend! It’s really lovely to think that so many Dads will be receiving a special handmade Ruby card – it really means so much to me that so many people have chosen to send one of our cards, so heartwarming!

This week will be an exciting week for Ruby Wren Designs! We will be appearing in print for the first time – the notonthehighstreet.com Summer 2010 Catalogue! We’re so excited here at Ruby HQ!

Our first appearance features our handcut Father’s Day ‘Dad’ and ‘Daddy’ Cards! These are new for Spring/Summer 2010 and are feature our new handcut text effect. They’re quite painstaking to cut out so customers can be assured that they are giving something unique, which time has been spent making and a lot of love has been put into it. Unfortunately, this means a lot of work for Ruby Wren but we think it’s worthwhile!

You can see our cards in the ‘Finishing Touches’ section of the catalogue (page 39) next to the ordering instructions. Our friends at Coulson Macleod are also featured and you can check out their beautiful typography artwork on page 20.

Those clever people at NOTHS have also set up a virtual catalogue so you can view all those beautiful pages online here. To order your copy of the catalogue, which we fully recommend (full of gorgeous photos of gorgeous products!), please go to the order form here.

A little warning…receiving the catalogue and viewing all those goodies can have a negetive effect on your bank account