Hello!

Hello! Anyone there? Just me? Can I tell you a story?

Once upon a time we had a blog for Grace & Favour Home, but life being what it is, running a business singlehandedly rather got in the way of sharing my musings and all the things that inspired me. So the blog got neglected and ignored, until it had been so long since I last posted that I didn't feel like I could post anymore!

Fast forward a few years (yes, really!) and the business has grown (hurrah!) and so now there are three of us running the day to day stuff at G&F, plus a team of helpers 'off site' who help to bring all the printed textile goodness to you lovely customers. So now in the spirit of New Year, and new starts (shhh, I know it's February already!), we felt it was time to resurrect the blog, and hopefully share some of our world with you!

To kick things off, I thought a few introductions might be useful - if you're reading this then you might just know a little about us but for those who don't, here we are!

I'm Rachael and I am the founder of Grace & Favour Home, which is a small design led homeware and gift company based in beautiful Devon. I started the business in 2010, looking for a real creative outlet for my work that didn't involve upping sticks and moving to a big city. From a background in Fashion/Textile Design, I set to designing the kind of homewares I wanted to have in my own home, and gradually this developed into my own ranges of fabric and creating something that you definitely won't find anywhere else! I ran the business by myself for several years, with my long suffering other half Steve giving up holidays and weekends to help out with trade shows, fairs and orders!

By the end of 2013 we were spending every spare minute of time working on the business and juggling family life, so we made a big decision for Steve to leave his job and join 'the Team'. 

Steve has been a partner in the business for 3 years now and is an all round superstar - if you order one of our personalised map hearts or houses, Steve will be the one who makes it - his knowledge of maps and his skill in making them is all kinds of awesome! He is also the sensible business head - keeping my extreme ideas in check and encouraging me to have faith in the good ideas.

Here we are, trying very hard to be serious business people (and failing miserably!).

While we started small and worked from a converted outbuilding at home, we now work from an industrial unit close to the beautiful town of Bovey Tracey (home of the awesome Contemporary Craft Festival - we'll be there in June!) which gives us lots of space to design, make, and pack products for all our lovely customers (that's you!) and all our stockists. 

The third member of our team is lovely Louise who goes by the title of Studio Assistant, which means she is a bit of a good egg, mucking in with whatever random request we give her, and keeping Steve and I in line! She makes a marvellous cup of coffee, and knows far more than me about spread sheets and systems! Louise also preps all the textile products ready to go out to our merry band of sewing ladies so if you buy a cushion, or a purse from us, Louise has had a hand in it! Bottom line is, we love Louise!

As I mentioned previously, we also have a lovely team of ladies (no men applied, sadly) who sew some of our products off site - working from their own homes and studios to bring you high quality, made in the United Kingdom goodness from Grace & Favour Home, hopefully we can introduce you to some of them at a later date!

So that's us, we hope you've enjoyed 'meeting us' and hopefully we'll get to meet some of you in the flesh at one of our events really soon!

With this blog we’re hoping to bring you a mixture of behind the scenes posts (these are my absolute favourite on other people’s blogs!), news and offers from the studio, new products and generally amazing things we’ve discovered from other designers (because who doesn’t like a helping hand to find new goodies to buy?!).

See you soon

Rachael x