Lockdown has really given us the chance to look at the long-term picture and how we can begin venturing into new territories, especially with the foreign visitors. Since starting up again my phone never stops ringing, it’s been the busiest August we’ve had and we’re also looking at opening our gift shop in Tiree airport in the next few weeks.
We’ve been focussed on a concept called ‘Blue Health and Space’ which addresses the advantages of being on, around or near water. So we’re really pushing this in our marketing communications going forward and are looking to support charities like Alzheimer Scotland with this.
As a gift retail unit we haven’t really had the opportunity to go above and beyond. We did offer door step delivery and dropped all our sweetie stock up to a hospital for the staff and donated all the new unopened bags we had to the local food bank.
We’ve really had to diversify our business since covid. We recognised early on that the spa and pools aspect would be heavily affected which is a core part of our business. So, we then looked at other possible revenues to get people staying overnight and have built an RV park and campsite, which is due to open mid-August.
I actually got evicted from my old premises during lockdown, so I spent my time moving out of there into my new café in Bellmore. In between, I was making afternoon tea every Saturday, this became very popular, lots of people from the mainland ordered them as surprise gifts for their friends and families here. It was really great seeing their reactions.
Since we had to close during lockdown, we’ve been coming up with lots of new ways to get creative. We’ve launched a new product called Cait Sith which generated a lot of interest online and we then had two free colouring book competitions (images of their bottles) where you could win bottles of our very own gin. We had a huge response and we’re now looking at launching our own jigsaws, or Ginsaws as we like to call them, based on our
Without a doubt, being able to showcase the new distillery in Islay. Being the new kid on the block, loads of people have been desperate to visit. I’d say we’ve also missed our international guests.
We have our own hens for giving our guests the freshest eggs but due to lockdown there was a big excessive of them! So we would put them out at the beach across from where we lived and left an honesty box.
We’ve been so busy doing major renovations on the café, it was heart breaking when we went into lockdown and we couldn’t open the café after all the effort that was put in. Last week we had a soft launch and it was monumental the amount of people that showed up to support us - it was just overwhelming!
It’s been really nice getting back to a sense of normality, but I have missed being able to provide the usual bird-watching trips we would do from April – August and our customers.
We have actually saw a real spike on our e-commerce site since launching. This is something we’ll continue to do post lockdown and even deliver to the likes of holiday cottages, hotels etc to encourage not having to queue outside the shop as it’s a one in one out system.
It’s certainly focused the mind. As a result, we have worked very hard to put new operating procedures into place. I’ve been very keen to get children back out onto the water after months of inactivity. They’ve done so well coping without any social interaction.
I set up my an online free directory for businesses in the area, this then grew into a digital marketplace for businesses who perhaps were not set up online due to the high barrier fees. So far, we have 450 businesses listed on the website with 100 using for online marketing and over 1,000 products.
