Morning, all. I keep saying I'm going to give an update on Common Brimstone, and then I keep discovering another week has gone by without me doing it. So! Here we go. A definite, actual, real-live update on the shop to cover a few questions that have been coming up.
First of all, yes, I am absolutely going to re-open again.
Second of all, no, I'm not quite sure when.
The main reason for this is that two of my key UK suppliers (one for fragrance oils and one for essential oils) are either indefinitely closed or moving overseas. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the "indefinitely closed" fragrance oil supplier reopens, because some of the FOs I get from them aren't available elsewhere in the UK, and it's not always cost-effective to order from overseas. With the EO supplier, I get a lot of my more weird and wonderful oils from them, like ruby gromwell, and again, it may no longer be cost-effective to use them once they've relocated.
I don't want to put off reopening forever, but I'm at least waiting to get a better idea of the shipping costs involved in continuing to use the EO supplier. It may be that it's not practical without raising my own prices, which I'm reluctant to do. If I have to drop both suppliers, it means some perfumes will have to be phased out of my catalogue (nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!).
The secondary reason I've extended my "winter break" (which I guess is now just a break), is that I've been writing like a mad woman. I write under my own name and a pen name, and have a long list of unfinished projects under both. I resolved to get some of them finished and (hopefully) published this year, so everything else (like leaving the house and seeing daylight) has taken a bit of a backseat to this. Keeping the balance right between filling perfume orders, creating new perfumes, writing, and my day job, was near impossible last year, and I ended up pretty burnt out by the end of 2016. It's been nice to slow down a bit and concentrate on the writing.
That said, I really miss making perfumes, and I have so many plans for new ones! So never fear, Common Brimstone is not going away. I'm not going to put a firm date on reopening for the above reasons, but I expect/hope to be back in business within the next three months. By then, either I will know what's happening with the FO/EO suppliers, or I will be impatient with waiting and will make alternative plans anyway.
I am going to be working on new scents in the meantime (April is a good month for creative stuff, because there are so many bank holidays to give me extra creative time!), and I'll be talking about those, of course! So stick with me - I am plotting a grand return ;)
