Blush and Gold featured in the Evening Standard!

November has been such a great month for us as a couple and as a business. The pregnancy is going well and we have finally finished getting the nursery ready. We also made a last minute decision to move our home office into the furthest room in the house. This means that it should be easier to separare family and work life once the baby comes.

Having been thinking about how to best resolve the issue of home/work when our home is our workplace, we were incredibly happy to be contacted by Etsy to run a  feature on exactly this topic in the Evening Standard. You can read the full interview below.

How did you come to trade on Etsy; how long have you been trading, how has your business developed?
Blush and Gold is a stationery boutique founded in 2016 by Mara; the idea behind it was to create fine stationery and gifts to help people treasure the memories from the most important times in their lives. Mara’s background was as a graphic designer and she started the business after getting engaged to her partner Paul (who now runs the company alongside her). Blush and Gold started trading on Etsy shortly after forming the in 2016 and it has been an incredibly valuable way of expanding our customer base and reaching people all over the world. Our customers are generally people buying practical, but also luxurious and elegant products, or people looking to buy meaningful gifts for close friends and relatives


What do you sell on Etsy? What has inspired you? How do you make this product? What have you had to learn/research to make this product? 
On Etsy, we sell wedding planners, baby memory journals, body and soul journals and are soon bringing out new ranges of products including Guestbooks, new personalised ranges and diaries in 2020. What sets our products apart are the designs and the luxury feel of the products, the attention to detail and the amount of time that we spend on the content within the books. We also are committed to making sure our products are as inclusive as possible and have recently launched our Gender Neutral wedding planners (nominated for the Etsy Design Awards 2019) which are perfect for LGBT+ weddings.

Our products are designed by us in the UK and manufactured by our printing partners; we follow the manufacturing process closely and make sure that our products are always made to the highest standards.

Our most popular product range has been our Wedding Planners; it’s the first product range we launched and has had time to develop a large customer base and trust in the product. Our Baby Journal range launched around a year ago has been catching up extremely quickly - our Grey Baby Journal has been one of our bestselling products recently.

From feedback we receive, we know that Londoners love the designs, the elegant and luxurious feel to them and they also value the content within the books helping them to either plan their weddings or treasure important memories.

What London area you live in, and what type of house/flat? How do you fit making your product into your life?
We live in Walthamstow, in East London in a terraced house. We live together (Paul and Mara) and we run Blush and Gold from our spare room which is now a home office. We are also expecting our first baby in December which has prompted us into reflecting on how we run the business; we’ve made a number of changes over the past year to make it as efficient as possible so that we’ll be able to focus on the baby, whilst still providing an excellent service for our customers.

How has trading on Etsy affected/altered your life? What do you love about selling on Etsy?
Trading on Etsy has been an incredible journey for us; it’s been pivotal in bringing about the success we’ve had over the past few years and it has genuinely changed our lives. The reach that Etsy has worldwide has allowed us to reach thousands of customers at home and abroad; we love the fact that trading on Etsy puts us in contact with people from all over the world on a daily basis and has really helped us to expand our horizons. The experience and connections we make through Etsy continually inform changes to our existing product ranges and help us to create and design new products.