Kindness. Love. Togetherness.

I love nothing more than hearing from our customers and having a little chat with you. It's wonderful to listen to your stories and connect as, afterall, this is what makes our world go round. For without human connection, what is there to life itself?

Just this past week, I've been fortunate to hear from Deborah, a primary school teacher, who told me about how their school celebrated Children's Mental Health Week. "In addition to doing the usual Maths and English, we did a lot of PSHE activities and games which the children said they wanted to do in order to make them feel good about themselves.  We did a welly walk in our school's Woodland Walk and spent a lovely afternoon, in the cold and rain, building dens! It made such a difference to their attitude and behaviour when we returned to the classroom." Isn't that just wonderful?

I also enjoyed a lovely chat with Judith who had recently purchased a face mask and I loved hearing her stories of her little Jack Russell and her dinner party days in London.

And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Sue this week, who, honestly, is Kindness personified. 

This past year has been so tough for all the obvious reasons but on the flip side, it has been a wonderful reminder about appreciation and gratitude of the simple things in life. For when we peel back all the layers and go back to the very basics of humanity, it's these three little words that repeatedly matter. Kindness. Love. Togetherness.

I've been finding that these three little words have really held their own and had such an impact over the past year and in fact, I briefly wrote about Kindness and Togetherness in My Top Nine Highlights of 2020 blog post which you can read here.

Love is far too complicated a topic for me to take on right here but to help put it into context as part of our three words, for me, love is an emotion that manifests itself physically too; a sense of nurturing, caring and protecting each other. A feeling that your little heart can just burst with happiness, that you have all you will ever need and that you will do everything to fiercely protect and care for those around you.

To change the subject slightly, many of you will have read previously that I've been working on a new project with the lovely illustrator Victoria Fitton (you can read my previous post here), and together, we have created a set of beautiful illustrations that will be printed onto our new range of bags. As a little message to the carrier, each bag will have these three little words printed on the back, to instill optimism and positivity; a gentle reminder of the tough times we have survived and how we can get through the seemingly impossible by supporting each other with kindness, love and togetherness.

I can't wait to share with you our illustrations and what we've been working so hard on for the past number of weeks but for now, I wanted to share a little sneak peek and send you a little love ahead of Valentine's Day.

Speaking of which, I wonder whether Valentine's Day this year will be a very different sort of day to what we have previously experienced? More inclusive, more sharing of our love for others rather than just romantically linked. I hope so. After all we've been through together, I hope that we will be able to show our appreciation more widely and share the love ❤️ Kindness. Love. Togetherness.