Velvet Antlers launched!

Well after a lot of hard work, Velvet Antlers is finally here. We’ve launched our luxury Scottish hampers in November, just like we said we would – by the skin of our teeth! At long last, we’re all systems go, ready to supply you and your nearest and dearest with tasty treats and gorgeous goodies. Orders for Christmas have already started coming in.

Let us know what you think of our hampers and remember to enter the competition on Scottish Style below. The winner of a Wee Beauty will be announced on Sunday!

Presenting - it's more difficult than you would imagine

The past couple of days have been the start of a steep learning curve for me as I attempted to turn my hand to presenting for the BBC. Landward kindly asked if I would present a piece on the origin and meaning of Scottish hill names for them over the next couple of weeks. But I couldn’t help but wonder as I drove home after the first couple of days filming if they were sitting in their own car crying, “What have we done?” Dave and I have been interviewed a few times, both on and off the camera and I now realise it’s amazing how comfortable I had become answering what are usually really rather personal questions about myself and my relationship with my husband. It’s a different kettle of fish when the tables are turned and it’s you asking the questions, thank goodness then for Peter Drummond, the author of Scottish Hill Names who was very patient with this first time interviewer. Lashing rain meant we had to head indoors to the Clachaig for filming on the first day which was a shame as it would have been good to head out into Glen Coe with Peter - what this man doesn’t know about hill names isn’t, as the saying goes, worth knowing.

Day two was spent getting to know Schiehallion a little better. David Williamson, the cameraman, shouldered the camera and tripod and charged off up the path with the producer not far behind him, with me bringing up the rear, some way off. Did nobody tell them I was as slow as the proverbial week in the jail? Oh dear, it looks like I might have to get somewhat fitter over the next few weeks as I have a fair few mountains left to climb.

The first instalment should be going out this Friday at 7pm, BBC2.

Don’t laugh.

Velvet Antlers heads to the BBC Good Food Show (and Spain)

Dave and I hit the A82 heading south on Saturday afternoon; Dave on his way to the sun and some bolt-clipping in Siurana and me on my way to the SECC for the BBC Good Food Shows’ first visit to Scotland - and it was inspiring to see how jam-packed it was. It was standing room only, way, way at the back at The Winter Kitchen and you had to have your elbows sharpened if you wanted near any of the stands that were giving away samples – all good, clean fun.

Photo courtesy of Coco Chocolate

What was great about this show was that as well as all the usual suspects, there was an interesting and uplifting array of smaller, Scottish producers outshining the big boys. Coco Chocolate's small but perfectly formed stand showcased the launch of their new range ‘Tattoo Love’ with beautiful ‘end of the pier’ drawings on each individual (dare I say it?) sexy, little organic chocolate. Can you call chocolate sexy? And by the time I got round to Fablet’s stand, the canny Glaswegians had all but finished off everything he had, the crumbs that I hoovered up though did make me sorry I hadn’t got there sooner.

The good thing about Velvet Antlers though, is that soon, we’ll be launching our product shots and then there will always be Good Food on show, whenever you want it.

Velvet Antlers joins the Guild of Fine Foods

Velvet Antlers are now members of the Guild of Fine Foods. The guild promote excellence and the interests of independent fine food retailers like us.

In other words, they help support us and save us from the might of the big supermarkets. Big chains have stifled some of the best elements of fine food culture in the UK; variety and the chance for ‘the little guy’ to maintain a presence, and offer y’all out there some really good food choices.

More power to their antlers! – muscling in with the big boys Tesco and Asda cannot be easy…

What is Scottish style? competition

We’ve obviously spent a fair bit of time thinking about this recently so we could try and perfect our hampers. But we really wondered what other people think good Scottish Style is.

So here is a wee challenge for ya (with a wee beauty of a prize if you do well!):

Comment on this post and tell us of a simple thing, thought, icon, image or phrase that characterises modern Scottish style, right now, in 2007.

The best comment by December 1st will win a Wee Beauty hamper – so get thinking! We’ll announce it on here.

Quite apart from the prize, we’d really appreciate the comments, just to discuss it and hear other folks thoughts. We want to see if we’ve got it right, and figure out how we can tweak our styling to make it even cooler!

What is different about Velvet Antlers?

Every new business has to be different. Sometimes new ventures are started because someone comes across something they need or want, but isn’t available. Other times it’s already available but needs improving. Sometimes it’s both.

Velvet Antlers hampers do both (you knew I was going to say that didn’t you).

Claire sprung on the idea of making hampers as a business after she realised just how much she enjoyed picking lovely items and putting them together herself into hampers for Christmas gifts for our families. When we looked at what hampers were available commercially, we could both see straight away that they looked very different from the Hampers Claire was making.

So how different can a hamper be (we hear you cry) ?

Note the lack of Tartan (and wicker, and shortbread, and…)

If you look at our hampers you’ll see that they are filled with undeniably Scottish stuff, but note the lack of Tartan, shortbread or wicker.

Scotland has more going on that cliché’s. We’ve tried to seek the new and cool stuff out, and put it in our hampers.

But rather than hit you with any cheesy marketing, we just reckon you should have a look at the hampers – it’ll be pretty obvious what’s different…

…style.

Velvet Antlers – where does that come from then?

It’s something we’ve been asked by everyone we’ve spoken to since Claire hatched the idea for our hamper business. We’re quite pleased about that, since that was of course our intention!

Velvet Antlers sells hampers and gifts. Claire’s concept for the flavour of the hampers we make was something Scottish – but new and a bit fresher. So much business and products coming out of Scotland keeps turning out an old cliché involving tartan, kilts, haggis, whisky and bagpipes. We certainly don’t think these icons are old and past. Indeed, we each own at least one piece of tartan clothing (I have two kilts!), eat haggis, drink whisky and are quite partial to a bit of piping.

It’s just that there’s a bit more to Scottish style. And the ‘bit more’ is pretty damn cool. We’ve tried to work that more modern and less known Scottish style into the stuff we make. So we needed a name that suited that.

The red deer that we see everywhere when were out in the hills climbing have a lovely smooth velvet covering their antlers while they grow. Antler velvet has been used as a nutritional supplement. If you google “Antler Velvet” you’ll find loads of results. We thought that the image of the red deer stag was very Scottish, but the velvet matched our idea of putting a lovely style and feel on a quite traditional product.

What do you think of the name? please comment below!

Convenient customers only

If you watch telly you’ll probably remember the advert about ‘brand new customers only’. If you didn’t, watch the you tube below. It’s a smart advert because it hit a bit of a chord. There are so many services that want to squeeze out the not so convenient customers just to make a wee % more profit, or just because they just want to skip the hassle of dealing with ‘you’ because ‘you are different’.

In our business, we found the same thing going on. The inconvenience we create is our location – the highlands. When we shop on the net, we perk up when we see the words “We deliver to all UK mainland addresses”. It’s usually only once we’ve chosen something and hit ‘proceed to checkout’ that the small print flags up “deliveries to Scottish highlands and islands carry an extra charge of [£ a lot]”.

Our attitude is that if you want to buy our products, we will remove barriers for you, not put them up. So if you are a ‘different’ request or need from most others, just get in touch with us.

Dave MacLeod's introduction

Since Claire kicked off the Velvet Antlers blog with her own story, I better tell fill in the other half of the Velvet Antlers picture. I got started in working for myself as a rock climber, running lectures and coaching sessions or writing guidebooks or articles about my favourite sport.

Working for myself in a little ‘niche’ interest area like climbing taught me some amazing things. Before my first experiences in business, I always thought, like many folks, that things in life ‘should’ be a certain way. And if they weren’t that way, it was someone’s fault for not sorting it out. Through my climbing related work, I learned that if you find things that aren’t as they should or could potentially be, it’s your own responsibility to do something about it. And what’s more, it’s possible to change some quite big thing you might not have though possible.

I guess this is not news for plenty of people, but it was a big wake up call for me. As soon as I started thinking with this mindset, I got excited for all sort of projects as I’m sure most young business people do. So when Claire raised the idea of Velvet Antlers hampers and talked to me about how no one was making a product with a Scottish identity that was, to put it squarely, ‘cool enough’. I was really psyched to work on it with her.

Apart from bouncing the ideas and processes back and forth between us to develop the idea and the products, my main tack so far has been to build this website. Although I’ve run my own websites for a year or so and built them up myself, this was my first time designing and building a site from scratch. If your savvy about sites and web design, I’d really appreciate if you commented anything you noticed about the site that I could improve. I really am a novice here so need all the help I can get.

Next up for me will be trying to talk to people about the hampers we’re making (including through this blog or course) .

Why are Christmas hampers the coolest Christmas present idea you ever stumbled upon?

It’s one of those things that should, in theory, be quite good fun…

The idea of looking around for nice things to buy your friends and family should be quite a cool activity. But let’s be brutally honest, the reality is it lies somewhere on a continuum between ‘a challenging task’ and ‘a real stress’ most of the time. You may even wish to put it more bluntly than I have. The reason why is obvious – everyone has everything they need. Isn’t it true?

Well, not quite. If you think about it, you can always think of one or two things you could do with (and if someone managed to second guess your mind, you would be a happy lad/lassie on Christmas). But unfortunately, when it’s you buying gifts for Christmas, birthdays etc you rarely have access to that gold dust – stress saving information.

So you end up stressing, getting something they might already have or don’t really want. What a waste. These days, everyone has so many possessions. There’s just no way round it. So gift giving will become harder and harder and less satisfying every year.

And all we are after is something really nice – a wee treat – that gives both you as the giver, and your lucky recipient a good feeling.

Good food and good style will always be something you can give again and again, and your recipient will never already have too much of it. That’s why a hamper (a really cool one, like these!) is the best Christmas present idea you ever stumbled upon.

PS: If you can think of some other belters of Christmas present ideas that aren’t something people can already have too much of – please comment below and let us know the great ideas you’ve had. We might even start making them (better)!

Good food makes people happy

Good food always makes people happy, no matter how much or how little they already have.

We are Velvet Antlers

I’ll start this blog by introducing ourselves and Velvet Antlers. Velvet Antlers is new company selling luxury hampers filled with the very best food and gifts that Scotland has to offer. It is run by Claire (me!) and Dave MacLeod; Dave being my wingman, there to provide moral and technical support when called upon, which is quite often, as it happens. My background is quite varied, like a lot of people I guess.

My professional background is in retail management in Glasgow, which all changed when we took the life changing decision to move to the Scottish Highlands. I still wanted to carry on doing what I was doing though as I had worked hard to get where I was and the perfect outlet for this was combing my passion of fine food with the joys of internet shopping. The decision to move to the Scottish Highlands was borne out of the desire for Dave to be nearer the mountains (more later!) and a keen willingness from me to live in a place that I have fallen in love with. Who can argue with this as a view out of their office window?

So what do I do when not making hampers?

Another big passion of mine is photography. I trained in photography, graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2003. I’m still as keen as ever to take photos, and I will regularly post my latest work on here to keep you up to date. They are usually of this guy...

Dave, being a keen (and rather well known) climber, finds living at the foot of Ben Nevis is pretty much an ideal spot for him to live. In between finding new climbs and helping me run Velvet Antlers, he gives lectures to international audiences and coaches climbers around the UK and Europe.

Velvet Antlers is here to provide you with amazing Scottish food and gifts. I’ve used my art-school training, fine food tasting, retail experience and knowledge of Scotland to provide something that not only looks contemporary and unique but tastes pretty damn good too. So welcome on board the Velvet Antlers blog, subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with all the latest about Claire and Dave MacLeod and the latest in our adventures with Scottish food.