It has been a busy few weeks. We are now fully into the Christmas trading period and the early signs are very encouraging. Our sales on cards, crackers and wrapping paper are already impressive.

Our weekly challenge to get stock out has become a little more difficult with the extra deliveries from our central warehouse to bring in the bulk of the Christmas stock. But these deliveries have now peaked and our task of displaying the stock will get easier over the next few weeks.

Original Factory Shop produced its first six-month trading report at the end of October. I was pleased to see that our branch sales were up 6 per cent on last year and our customer count has also risen.

This is in part owing to a loyal customer base coming to us first. They know they can get a lot of what they want in one place, without having to trawl the high street. This has been particularly noticeable during this summer’s poor weather. Although our site is on the edge of town, we have a large, free car park, so, if it is raining, customers know that they can park close to our store, pop in and get what they want without any hassle.

I have been helping with store openings for a number of years now and last month we opened our first store in a city centre shopping mall, in Bournemouth. Although store openings are hard work, they are massively rewarding – I love the challenge of having a limited time to get the store ready to trade. I also enjoy meeting people, training them and watching how they develop over the few days you are with them.

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