Summer sale now on!

We all know someone who has a birthday coming soon, or someone that is due to move house or someone that is about to have a baby. Well now you can stop worrying about what to buy them as Velvet Antlers now has 20% off all hampers! We can deliver to their home or you can surprise them at work with a hamper full of tasty treats and the beauty of it is, that not only are they currently on sale, they can’t fail to enjoy their lovely present – who doesn’t like good food?! And do you know things just get better and better as we are accepting delivery dates on sale prices right up until 30th August 2008 so you can buy them now at their sale price and not have to worry about forgetting that all important birthday. Genius.

Your Valentines Day gift sorted

Fear not, the blind panic that descends as we creep closer to Valentines Day can be completely avoided. Send your nearest and dearest a Lovey Dovey Hamper (cool name or not? What do you think?) and sidestep that whole drama whilst earning yourself a stack of brownie points for your thoughtfulness – result!

View the range of Velvet Antlers Valentines hampers here.

Stuff we chose for our hampers part 4 – Gillies Clootie

It’s really no wonder people get so worked up about planning their weddings. It really is quite important for things to be just right. A wedding is your chance to tell most of the people you know something about yourself and your style.

The style we wanted for our wedding was ‘Scottish’, ‘chilled’ and ‘informal’. We reckon we hit the right note and so we still look back and think it was a great day and we were very comfortable. You know I think that in an ideal wedding people should really feel at home. Sometimes big gatherings get so formal and I think that limits the fun a little bit (sure, or course some alcohol later on helps make this dissolve, if not swing quite the other way!). But if you choose all the details for your wedding accordingly, I think it’s possible to side step this issue and put everyone at ease and in the mood for a good time from the word go.

And every detail is important – the venue, the food, the arrangements etc etc. But the food is possibly most critical. Whisky is powerful stuff, but even the thirstiest Scot cannot ceilidh dance into the wee small hours on an empty stomach. We went to a wedding some years ago in a very majestic Scottish castle, but ended up doing mass minibus runs to the local chip shop. There was no food at the reception and everyone was too hungry to dance and needed party fuel urgently!

For our wedding lunch we took our family to The Oak Tree at Balmaha on Loch Lomond. If you are in the area it carries a strong recommendation from us! Our chosen dessert was Clootie dumpling. Clootie is like so many features of Scottish style, culture, or food; quite traditional in origin but is so damn good that it’s easy to give it a modern twist and make it something pretty cool. In this case, a little high quality vanilla ice cream or, if you prefer to keep it ‘retro cool tradtional’ then some fresh custard, and bingo – You have just fuelled a room full of people to complete many dance floor pounding hours.

Whatever you want to burn off your Clootie doing, you’ll find a generous hunk of it in our Sheer Belter and Pure Stoater hampers.

Stuff we chose for our hampers part 3 – Kshocolat

The first flat Dave and I shared together was somewhat jammy for a pair of financially challenged students. My Bro had taken a contract job in sunnier climbs and we ‘looked after’ his place in the Merchant City of Glasvegas. We felt a little out of place. My little Renault 5 kept attracting polite notices not to park here again in the block’s private parking area. Anyone seen dead in such a vehicle couldn’t possibly afford such an address. I’d just graduated from art school and often sold my prints at a cool art fair across the road in the elegant Merchant Square.

It was hard, (well, torturous actually) to attempt to spend a whole day in front of Kshocolat’s boutique at my stall without giving in to the temptation of their magnificent hot chocolates. Thankfully my photographs sold well enough to warrant regular indulgence. The taste of Kshocolat’s white chocolate is my defining memory of living in this rather nice part of the world, five years ago. If only I could have such a nice memory of every place I’ve lived…

So now it comes around that I have the chance to share that special indulgence through Velvet Antlers. I’m pretty happy about that.

You’ll find Kshocolat’s white hot chocolate in our Pure Stoater, One for the Lassies hampers.

Stuff we chose for our hampers, part 2 – Arran Aromatics

The Scots are a damn lucky bunch when it comes to holidays. Glaswegians like us especially so. As well as the usual choices of getting on a plane anywhere, we have an almost inexhaustible resource of lovely places to discover in our own islands. Often, it’s financial constraints that lead Scot’s to holiday within Scotland, but it’s probably the time most outdoor lovers discovered the highlands and islands.

The isle of Arran is a popular haunt of Glaswegians off work for the summer ‘Glasgow Fair’ weekend, summer holidays, weekend warrior trips and these days, stag and hen dos!

For us, it was Arran’s famous granite mountains that brought us across on the Friday night crossing to Brodick and the long trek up the road to Glen Rosa campsite. Later, we discovered the quietude of camping in Glen Sannox beside some old ruins. This became our base for exploring the cliffs of Cir Mhor, The Bastion and Cuithe Mheadonach. The mood of these mountains really leaves an impression on you. Such a small mountain range, but I remember feeling so remote hanging off a huge granite flake listening to the silence of the summer mountain air and feeling the warm up-draught as the 300 foot plated granite wall soaked up the afternoon sun. Only the sight of the tiny wee Calmac ferry scurrying back and forth across the firth of Clyde to Ardrossan reminds you that civilisation is not too far away.

On that summer updraught I also remember the smells. They always seem so much stronger in the hebridean mountains than anywhere else we have spent time. Blossoming heather, peat drying in the summer heat, and the raw untouched granite, as the crystals under my feet scrittle slightly, disturbed for the first time since the glaciers left.

Arran Aromatics have made it their life’s work to bottle this most exquisite of sensory experiences. So we thought it was perfect for Velvet Antlers hampers.

Stuff we chose for our hampers, part 1 - Brew Ha Ha

It’s a known fact – the Scots love to drink. We heard somewhere that folk outside of Scotland thought our national drink was whisky; Who told them that?! Of course if you go by gallons consumed per second in Scotland, it’s gonna be tea that stands out by a mile. Many of those gallons per second are consumed at Velvet Antlers towers, by Dave, who makes a cup of tea while he thinks about making a cup of tea. So let’s say he’s developed a fine sense of a good cup of tea.

For our hampers we chose Brew Ha Ha tea – a Glasgow company that we thought took tea a seriously as us and had a fair dose of cool factor. Brew’s the daddy?

…you are!

As we all know though, a good tea bag is only one part of the process of constructing a cup of tea worth talking about. It’s a dark art. According to Dave, Scotland is still split by those in the ‘milk in the bottom of the cup before water’, and the ‘strictly milk after the tea has brewed’ camps. We want to get some data on this to settle the issue. Please vote below!

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!

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…

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!

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) .

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.