On The Plus Side
Most importantly, we are still growing. Our growth might be much more slow and steady than exponential, but growth is better than the alternative. It feels like we are now well established as Hastings favourite chocolatier.
Looking at our sales in more detail, shop sales are the the bulk of the business, and they have grown by almost 10%. What surprised me this year was our online sales. Although they are currently a fairly small part of the business overall, and I didn’t do much to promote them this year, sales were up by 50%. This was unexpected and does suggest I should be leaning into online a bit more this year.
In terms of product sales, we saw the biggest growth in our bagged products, also known as nibbles. This was really pleasing as after my trip to various Yorkshire chocolatiers back in May this was one of the areas I decided to focus on.
The other big jump was in workshops, courses and parties, which were around 50% up. Which is great, as I really enjoy doing them.
It also feels like stock management went really well this year. Our last couple of Easter Eggs sold on Easter Sunday, and we still had enough chocolates left on Christmas Eve to put together a decent selection box, unlike every past year.
On The Down Side
Chocolate prices have risen by a terrifying amount this year, peaking at over 300% of the historic norm. We are not expecting them to drop in the short term. We have managed to avoid raising prices by stocking up on ingredients in the first half of the year, but those stocks are almost gone now. I don’t want to preempt changes coming in the next week or two, especially when they are not finalised yet, but let’s just say there is a lot of maths happening when I’m not producing product at the moment.
Our market sales were down a little this year. I’m not too concerned by this, as for weather related and personal reasons we had to miss two of our biggest Christmas markets. Looking at the numbers, if these had happened market sales would have matched last year.
Bar sales were also down a little this year. But the best time for sales is Christmas, and bars in particular do well at markets, so I think our missed markets explain this.
Advent calendars were down a little this year, but I wonder if that was because last year was our first year doing them.
The big disappointment this year was ice cream sales. They were OK in July, matching last year, and September was pretty good too. But, oh my god, August, what happened? We sold almost none. I have no idea why, the weather wasn’t THAT bad, but no-one bought. I really want to push the ice cream this summer, as our ice cream is REALLY damn good…
More Generally
When I started writing this post I was going to comment on the fact that while we haven’t gained any new shops in the Arcade, we also haven’t lost any. Unfortunately in the week or so I’ve been putting this together events have overtaken me. Two businesses have relocated under circumstances I won’t be going into, and the Arcade is now emptier than it has been for a long time.
We have also seen the sad closure of too many independent shops in the town centre over the last year, and especially over the last few weeks. I can think of around half a dozen closure announcements since Christmas alone. It all shows how tough it is to run a small independent business at the moment. You can be sure we appreciate every visit to our shop, and every visit to the website.
