200 Months On ...

If you're not on socials, or just missed it in the scroll, here it all is in one place. Grab a brew.

everythingCHILLI has been trading for 200 months this summer. 

It's a weird scale to notice, I know, but that's how I roll ... and who wants to hang around for a 20th anniversary before celebrating?

I almost ignored it because micro-business life tends to be about the next order, the next event, the next thing on the Everlasting To Do List ™, the next challenge.
However, it nudged me to stop and look back properly at everythingCHILLI since that first innocent whimsical batch in 2009 when I couldn't find any chilli jam locally. Who knew?

I cannot tell you how much water has flowed under my metaphorical bridge since the humble part-time beginnings. Ups, downs and a couple of sideways! More late nights than are good for me, and lots of good times with good people too.  Since then I've built the range, connections with other makers and businesses, and built the business.  Watch out for some 'throwback' posts over the next couple of months!

I'm still making every jar myself. Still laying out my stall at markets, events and pop-ups, supplying to shops and of course selling online.  Still coming up with new varieties and still listening to customers.

Still standing.

The milestone feels worth acknowledging, and so I'll be celebrating it properly during the next couple of months with a few wee special things for customers, trade outlets and corporate pop-up venues and supporters. I'm going to some new events so that I can meet even more of you, contacting more potential outlets with a great relaunch package and putting something special on online orders too.

And if you're wondering, 200 months is approx 47,323 lids tightened by hand.

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Here's the retrospective - a shoebox of memories from #200months of everythingCHILLI, gathered from socials over the summer. Dig in.
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It's hard to explain the marmalade awards. It's a cross between a festival and a conference and a mythical land that appears once a year. Full of enthusiasts, exhibits, tastings, talks, and some *very* very earnest conversations about marmalade origins, making, colour, clarity and of course the way it should be eaten.

By month five I had settled on these amphora jars which I felt really mirrored the brand - rounded, not harsh, and conveyed the care I'd taken making the preserves.

My very very first jars (much fancier) have been lost in the mists of time, and I suspect I didn't even take pictures of them. I was really just making for immediate friends and family in the beginning, not planning a career!

Labels were hand fed through a stalwart lazer-jet printer*, guillotined and punched and threaded and tied by hand.

Original Chilli Relish (chilli jam), Pepper & Pear Relish (green chilli jam) and Lime Shred Marmalade were the 'big three' of the range. Today Original Chilli is still by far the best seller (but more on league tables later) and the other two are still in the core range.

In those early days, as now, I experimented with various pairings and had Plum and Papaya, Persimmon and Nutmeg, Kiwi and Pomegranate, Pumpkin and Citrus.

These are pictures from my Very First Stall. My sales display was ...umh ... simple. But it was no more than a hobby then, and I'd not long started a marketing role in financial services in Glasgow (little did I know then that I'd making the leap from there to professional food producer in 2014). Making and selling chilli preserves was a nice creative outlet and a nice reason to get out and about.

Do you remember those early flavours? Should one of them make a comeback? Do you still have an amphora jar?

#200months

*it's a Samsung ML1210 c.2005 and is still going today!

Catch me here today and in Ayr on Sunday for your fave chilli jams and hot sauces ... oh, and did I mention chilli crispy oil?

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#200months

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Photo credit Big D’s Cheese

In Month 80 (of 200, I did mention 200 months, didn't I? ) I had the opportunity to be part of the Open Golf at Royal Troon, and present my chilli jams and marmalades to the pro golfers and visitors from the Home of Golf stand which was promoting Ayrshire and Arran Tourism.

Proud to have been identified as a tiny business in Ayrshire worthy of representing the area.

Weather was gorgeous, and it was a grand day. Wonderful to introduce my products to people from all around the world and to get feedback.

Nobody sits down in 2009 and designs a perfect business intelligence system for a chilli preserve business that will still be running 17 years later .... Today I had one of those ridiculously satisfying (epiphany isn't too strong a word!) spreadsheet moments.

I've had a sales analysis sheet for years where every market or web sale or trade order is a row, every SKU (sorry, *product*) is a column, and formulae calculate revenue and costs.

It worked fine ... but the syntax had evolved into an absolute monster. Every time I added a product (and you know how I DO like to make limited editions and bring you new stuff!) I had to remember to add it into multiple calculations.

Cue discovering that Excel can already do what I wanted: match the SKU headers against my pricing table, pull the right price, multiply by the quantities, and total it up.

A 9,178-character formula has become a couple of lines.

Same data and output but almost zero maintenance, and a much happier spreadsheet driver.

Every day's a school day!

I have a job where I get to wear Halloween get-up to work ... and drive into town looking like this!

TamFest in Ayr was always a great fun day and an opportunity for traders to go just a wee bit daft. Good times!

In 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting, via Ayrshire Food Network, a man at the beating heart of the Slow Food Movement, founder Carlo Petrini.

Now, much as I adore all things Italy, I knew VERY little Italian (exactly two Berlitz CDs worth). I can tell you, that on being introduced to my products, one of his words was 'complimenti' and one of mine was 'grazie'.

Slow Food promotes and aims to protect local food and traditional cooking, *cultural* cooking. It was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986 and has since spread worldwide.

Sadly, I've just discovered that Carlo passed away just about 5 weeks ago, but he leaves a legacy of a movement defending 'proper food' made with integrity and intention - good, clean and fair. And a world with perhaps a better appreciation that food, environment, culture and business are strongly interwoven.

One of my first regular markets was in Kilmarnock town centre in the Burns Mall. Great for meeting customers and getting feedback on products!

Four local traders and I started the market and ran it about fortnightly for three years.

The market gave a platform to small local crafters and producers and let us have an outlet for our tiny fledgeling businesses.

It's not every day you get a fly-by from the Red Arrows!

Back in 2016, I was trading at the Air Show on Ayr's Low Green, alongside the lovely Bob and Annette from Odyssey Candles & Accessories Ltd. We're still pals to this day (and last week I met their funny and smart and beautiful granddaughter).

One of the unexpected joys of the last 200 months has been the people I've met along the way. Food festivals and markets have introduced me to some genuinely wonderful folk, and I'm grateful that so many of those connections have lasted well beyond the events themselves.

Sometimes small business is about flexing into an opportunity and being resourceful.

I'd travelled to Harrogate for the Country Living Magazine Show. The plan (Twingo loaded to the gunwales 'just in case' and coilsprings sweating) was to trade for just one day, in a tag-team arrangement with Little Doone

......but I discovered that there was a stand available for the next day. I had no tables, no lights, no nothing, except for stock and banners, but with a bit of tenacity, inventiveness and kind help from the organisers, I rustled up a solution. I quickly arranged accommodation for that evening and shifted my set-up into the new space.

It's far from my best-looking stall, but it got me in front of some new customers and gave me a relaxed evening instead of a 4 hour drive back to Ayrshire!

I took the plunge into self employment in 2014. Left my desk at a financial services marketing team on Friday, traded at Country Living at the SEC on Saturday.

Biggest sales day to that point. Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.

My rationale on handing in my notice was "the worst that can happen is that I fall flat on my face I have to get a job again" which was kind of exciting, kind of a very well calculated risk (monolithic spreadsheet, anyone?), kind of a personal necessity. It just made sense in my gut and sometimes you can analyse a thing to oblivion and then you realise that you're trying to justify what you've already decided to do!

Serendipity gave me a bit of an assist to get me off on a good footing with a solid event to start my self employed life.

And then didn't I go and win another international preserve making award in the same month!

Pic taken in the exhibitor bar area AFTER that long and productive day

Month 17, and this was becoming more than a hobby, so everythingCHILLI put together a website.

This was very bootstrappy, very DIY and extremely low cost - just the domain reg and space - no monthly fees ... and it worked fine for what I needed at the time. I'd tinkered with coding html before so I knew the basics. Some clever PayPal code made it shoppable without needing a separate payment portal. And it made sales. It worked.

I have to say though, that switching over to a paid, managed and robust platform in 2020, and finishing the last tweaks literally JUST before lockdown was the best luckily timed online move I've made.

The manually coded site was becoming clunky and time consuming (and a bit frail tbh) to manage and didn't give me the functionality or confidence I needed in my online presence. Automated order confirmations? Pshaw! I can't quite fathom how much maintenance and admin I did 'by hand' at that point.

Things have been much smoother and less faffy since then - but wow I didn't half learn a lot of coding along the way....and that helps me to spot japery and prankery or outright logic buffoonerism a mile off now, when I'm asking AI to finesse a tricky bit of code. Yep - I can't help myself from getting in among it!

New product varieties ... I'd been being asked on the regular "What's the hottest thing you have?" and "Is there anything hotter than that?" so it was time to come up with a new preserve that had a good kick and lots of flavour to back it up.

Smokin' Hot Red Onion Chutney came into being. Lots more birds eye chillies than Caramelised Red Onion, plus scotch bonnets, red finger chillies, smoked paprika, garlic, black pepper and some extra hot chilli powder for good measure.

It started as a limited edition, and then came into the core range after proving itself!

Awh, its very first label back when my products were in the amphora jars. (More on the jar change in another post...)

Funny the things you get to do when you make chilli jam for a living.

Dog Show Judge? Yeh, on ye go, I'll give that a bash.

I think the categories at the 2019 Culzean Dog Jamboree were Waggiest Tail (no self respecting dog show would miss that category), Best Looking, and Coolest Trick.

...the big black and white dude behind me didn't enter. Dunno why. Would have won the rosette for most nonchalant and suave.Month 50. I was still working my desk job and jamming at weekends at this point ... making inroads to the local foodie community and attending lovely networking events like this 'Creative Industries' event where Taste Ayrshire showcased local food producers including @Barwheys Dairy @Roundsquare Roastery @Little Doone , and CentreStage members displayed their performing skills.

Did you know that I stock indie shops, delis and farm shops? This window display of everythingCHILLI gift hampers was in Finnieston, and helped me to supply regulars and to reach new customers.

I remember being rather 'under pressure' (aka stressed out of my head) on one of the days I was topping it up ... having just come from an event in Glasgow which finished at 4pm, and on a deadline to get to the next one which started in Troon at 8pm. But that's what you sign up for as a solopreneur, especially in December - always on the go!

Shall we talk about 2020 and 2021?

It was pants. It was pants for everyone. Let's not forget it.

I hugged big dogs that I knew because living on my own, no human contact was allowed for a solid 3 months, before we could 'bubble'.

For at least a week, I woke to my phone pinging to tell me another event had been cancelled because of the "uncertain times".

No markets at all between mid March and mid September that year, and then only outdoor ones.

Months of indecision from the government on how they'd support the self employed ... and then a 'not quite as good as employed furlough' package (decreasing over time), paired with a one off grant for those with business premises. Don't get me wrong, I was completely appreciative of it.

I was 'lucky' ... I had put every penny of revenue through the books for HMRC and so I got the right amount of support based on past years' real trading figures. I'm not so sure that every self employed person could say the same. Karma, I suppose.

I kept the business afloat. The freshly updated website came into its own, and I did a wee bit more wholesale although the uptick nowhere near replaced the revenue from face to face events. I got round to a lot of stuff on my business and personal to do list.

Painted the hut.

Watched paint dry. Quite literally.

Doing larger shows is something I've mixed into my calendar over the years, alongside regular weekly/monthly markets and local events. This one was at the Glasgow Good Food Show in Autumn 2018. It's always a positive thing to connect with new customers and regulars.

Some of the photos I've shared are from one particularly difficult personal chapter (a proper 'annus horribilis'), which you'd never know from looking at the pictures. That's perhaps one of the things I've applied to these 200 months in business. You have to keep turning up and bringing the determination and consistency.

A more recent pic from a national event is coming before the end of the month ... totally different layout and feel

I wanted the old logo gone.

It didn't serve me any more and I was fed up looking at it. That chilli was too skinny, too harsh. The square brackets too restrictive and the custom font too overcooked.

I wanted continuity but a freshness. The same but different. Recognisable but better, nicer, stronger, more efficient.

So I fiddled about online looking at chilli shapes and let AI have a go. This was 2024 mind, and the output was a mess - it kept putting bits of faces in anything it created. Maybe I was using the wrong app. But it gave me the idea of making the chilli WAY more personal to me. As I was doodling, I realised that the chilli top is a wee bit like my signature - so why not. If it's good enough for a household-name-traditional-scottish-soup tin, it's good enough for me!

Because I am literally putting my hand to every jar which has the logo on it.

More doodling on paper and on my PC ensued. Turning the hard copy doodles into a graphics file (not via an outdated version of Corel Draw I'd had since the Dark Ages), and then thinking about how I'd vectorise it was a challenge, and a wholehearted huge thank you to Phil Yau at @yausfood for the help on that! The foodie community supporting others

In the end, I 'simply' started afresh, learned to use GIMP and made something that I really like.

Yes, I obsessed with tiny details. Yes, I debated whether there should be a slight overlap of certain lines. Yes, I wondered whether all the ends should be all curved or all sharp or a mixture. Yes, I considered slightly altering the basic colours. And yes, I was delighted to find Libre Baskerville, its lovely lowercase g, friendly y and sturdy uppercase H ... and the name was appropriate too. Libre. No square bracket bounds. So I gave it its proper space in the design. Solid.

I can't quite explain it, but the new logo is much more 'me' and it felt better. It's something I see pretty much every day and it's good to have something that I created and like bouncing around my retinas. I hope you like it too

....and yes, there were Many iterations!

I'd put big shows on the back burner for a while - sometimes the personal practicalities and economics of them simply don't stack up in terms of outcomes like cold hard sales or customer acquisition. Last year, I returned to a few in Glasgow, and I loved my set-up for Simply Christmas at the SEC.

It was a bit of brainwork and faff getting it all together and although at some points I was at the limits of my 'to do and think about' capacity and rather frazzled, I'm really chuffed with how it looked.

In addition, I had ALL of my varieties in stock, and plenty of them. It was almost as if the planets had aligned.

My fresh logo, new banners, the background pattern I'd created, and some new display hardware. Customer tracking with a QR code and behind the scenes coding I'd added to the website. Under-shelf lights .

It was a pretty nice situation to be in.

And I just had to take a wee minute to appreciate what I'd achieved and give myself a bit of a metaphorical clap on the back. I can't say I'd done the set up *totally* on my ownio, but yes the bulk of the mental and physical graft was my doing.

A very belated public thank you to Alex McCluskie for some practical help on this one and anti-frazzling support, and height-related tasks.

It's incredibly easy to see all the stuff you *haven't* done, achieved or pulled off (Branded gift boxes designed and print signed off but still awaiting arrival), but man, it was a nice moment to just relax a bit and feel that I'd brought my A game, and that customers were going to get the best possible experience at my stall, and that felt good.

My products have had a fair few of these over the years. Some jars even won awards in two categories in the same year.

I think there were 17 national and international awards at the last count. There's a physical award for Original Chilli around the place too ... probably weighing down a bundle of papers somewhere....

Some years I decided not to enter, some years the awards didn't run, and some years I just didn't think about it at all. They're nice to get, and they do provide a certain amount of confirmation and validation particularly when they're from experts in your niche. Having said all that though, I'm still not entirely convinced that awards are particularly important for business other than as a conversation starter.

Sometimes I think that having to apply and pay to be rated kind of goes against what an award should be about. I don't have a better solution though.

Anyway, that's my tuppenceworth for today. What are your thoughts on awards?

Did I tell you about the time I transformed a barn into a production kitchen?

There was nowhere suitable to rent locally, so I 'just' made a kitchen in Fenwick.  

I won't bore you with the minutiae of the application process with Building Control, or the time and expense everything took. 

What I will tell you is that the planning wouldn't have gone through without the tech drawings from my legend of a dad, and the whole endeavour would have been messier, more frustrating and more headachy and felt a whole lot more impossible without his and my mum's input.

Then there was equipment.

The builder doing the kitchen walls took me to their friendly scrappy, blagged me in, and helped me to find metal tables and two of my three required sinks. If you have never been to a scrap merchants, then I thoroughly recommend it. I saw some sights that day - 8-foot tall statues among the general ripped out dross.

I bootstrapped what I could - sourced another metal table from an Ayrshire restaurant amid a refurb, a couple more from a non-starter project.  I strongarmed them all in and out of a car.

A wee fridge freezer from a pal's mum. An oven from Gumtree (took two days to thoroughly clean it). A dishwasher and extractor from someone doing up their kitchen ... car again!

And lots more was new - a water heater installed, units, worktops, racking ... and so much to do. 

I built and levelled units, assembled, scrubbed, scraped, painted, and shifted. I probably did a lot of stressing and moaning too.

A new threshold, a hinged door that can retract behind the sliding door which was a rather genius invention from Dad.

It took ages, and then it was done, and time to make my first 'hand made, not home made' batch.

Separation between home and work at last. One of the best things I did for everythingCHILLI (and for me) in its 200 month history.

...and that's 200 months.

When I realised I was coming up to 200 months of trading, I nearly just carried on with the next thing on the list. That's what you do when you're running a small business.

But it has been good to pause, take stock and thank all you good folk.

I've spent the last couple of months sharing some of the things that have made up those 200 months – the events, the products, the awards, the faffing, the graft, the good times, the people, the things that went brilliantly and the things that didn't quite go to plan.

And looking back through old pictures and records, I think the thing I'm proudest of isn't any particular product, event or award.

It's that I applied myself and backed myself.

I kept trying new things, leaning into the stuff that worked and going lighter on the stuff that didn't - or sussing out why. I kept putting one foot in front of the other...kept my integrity and kinda kept sane and human in the process.

And somehow, 200 months have gone by.

So thank you to everyone who's been part of my team (whether on payroll as market staff or putting the Free into freelance moral support), bought a jar or ten, placed an online order, stocked the range, provided supplies, helped me to unload my stock or to put up a gazebo at an event, stopped for a taste, recommended me to someone, said "I don't even like chilli/marmalade/jam, but that's really nice", or simply followed along.

I'm glad I did it, and now I have an answer to "what would I achieve if I chucked in my job to do this full time?"

Also, given that the local online press has picked up the 200-month story, and seeing some of you sharing the story and commenting on it has been a rather lovely way to finish the celebration.

And now... on with the next ::ahem, not 200:: months.

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That's the #200months throwback campaign in full. 
Thank you to everyone who liked, commented, shared, or just quietly followed along, and of course to everyone who's bought a jar at some point over the last 16+ years. Month 201 is already underway, and there's plenty more to come. Watch this space.