Well, the thing is, we rarely get quiet times. Sometimes we long for quiet times but, the paradox is, if things are quiet then business is slow and if business is slow then there’s the worry that we will not be able to keep a roof over our heads and that worry drowns out the peace of any quiet times we may have had in the first place. I would call it a vicious circle but, when all’s said and done, we know we’re quite lucky to be doing what we’re doing and it’s really quite a pleasant circle to be in.
Luckily though, our customers keep us busy pretty much all of the time. We’ve been getting more and more people sending us their custom designs to tool onto the covers of our leather journals and binders.
We love this!
The vast range of uses our customers put our work to astounds us and you can see a few examples on our custom gallery here:
Usually March and April are our quietest months of the year, they always have been. In our seventeen years of business it has always been the same. January and February are busy, March and April are slow, May gets busy again and it stays that way for most of the year, getting hair-tearingly busy towards Christmas. However, this March and April, although a little slower than the rest of the year, have still been pretty busy.
We would normally be using the relative peace of the springtime to develop new ranges, something we rarely get time to do at any other time of the year. But this year we’ve had to put that aside so that we can do something far more important.
We’re making a new online home for Earthworks! Here’s a sneaky screenshot from the new homepage:
It’s about time really, our website has been with the old host for years and although they have been generally quite reliable they seem to be resolutely refusing to move with the times. We still don’t really have a satisfactory way for people to browse our site on mobile devices! So, we will be saying farewell to our old host, we will up anchor and sail the good ship Earthworks to a more civilised land where mobile compatibility comes as standard and where SEO has been discovered.
Our old site is obviously still up and running (so please continue to buy, as usual) while we’re behind the scenes creating the new one. When we first had the idea we thought, “That’ll be a quick and easy job, we’ll have it up and running in a few weeks”. That was back in January. We have become very, very aware that it has been a very, very long time since we built the last one. Even though basic templates make things easy, the strange and esoteric modern coding is, well . . strange and esoteric!
Here at Earthworks we are much more at home with physical tools than we are with virtual ones. We are skilled with things that cut, groove, indent, gouge, split and stain. Put us in front of a computer and you’ll find us, at best, scratching our heads and, at worst, slumped over the desk sobbing with despair.
But, we insist (perhaps ill-advisedly) on doing every single thing within Earthworks ourselves. Call us pernickety, call us control-freaks, call us obsessive fools (you wouldn’t be the first), but we will get there. The new website will be created. Perhaps later rather than sooner, but we will get there. And it will function beautifully, we insist upon it!
And when it’s finished, it will be a glorious thing! No more clunky old website. Earthworks Journals will have a sleek new home.
You must come and visit when it’s done. We’ll be sending out an invite to all Friends of Earthworks when it’s complete so you can come and let us know what you think.
What do you mean? You’re not a Friend of Earthworks? Very well, you can sign up on our website in the footer on our homepage. After all, you won’t want to miss out on our Grand Opening Discount Weekend!
Earthworks Journals 