What a year 2020 has been! I’ve always said that the biggest threat to business is the unforeseen, and Covid-19 is right up there as the biggest unforeseen any of us could ever have predicted. Covid has impacted the entire world both personally and professionally and I hope you are all doing okay through it all.
I want to say a very big thank you for supporting Willowberry during such a turbulent year; we have grown our business through it all thanks to the fact that we have always focused on selling our products online (so the shops shutting didn’t impact us too much), and so many of you bought our products and told others about Willowberry, too. THANK YOU.
We’ve also had so much amazing coverage from the media (Vogue, The Telegraph, Independent, to name just a few), who wanted to champion independent brands during this time – this gained Willowberry awareness with a much wider audience who had never heard of us before.
Not everything went to plan; I had been working on getting Willowberry into stores this year, which obviously I put on hold for now. I had also visited New York in March, just before lockdown struck, to get Willowberry stocked in the US (our biggest international market online), which again I had to put on hold. But we pivoted our focus and these remain in our business plans for when Covid is an ugly distant memory.
We launched 2 new products this year – the Willowberry Reviving Eye Cream, which instantly became (and remains) our number 1 bestseller, and the Willowberry Sensitive Face Oil, which has been a huge hit with people with eczema, rosacea and sensitive skin. Our online retail partner Victoria Health sold so many that they had to order 3 new batches of stock from us within one week! Our Sensitive Oil was also used on Fearne Cotton by her make-up artist Justine Jenkins, so that made things go a bit wild, too.
Your support also means that we were able to hire staff for the first time this year, so you are supporting not just our business, but other local businesses and freelancers, too.
We finished the year with a week-long pop-up counter in the beauty hall of John Lewis Cheltenham at Christmas time (after it being cancelled twice due to lockdowns), which was the most amazing experience and enabled me to meet lots of you lovely customers, while many new people discovered Willowberry for the first time.
I hope you have a merry Christmas in whatever form it takes this year and I wish you a very happy new year.
With love,
Jenni Retourné, Founder
