One month later, with no sales to report apart from a few to weary friends and family and the florist down the road, Hayley and Emma decided £200/week was optimistic in the extreme.
Hayley focussed back on her photography work, while Emma soldiered on alone – after all, there wasn’t much to do.
They joined a new market place called “Notonthehighstreet.com” who were very enthusiastic.
However, when they selected Hot Stuff to be featured in their Christmas catalogue and sales projections were ‘maybe 1,000’, Emma tried not to be too disappointed - she foresaw the potential for 20 times that at one stage.
It was the week before half term. The kids were back at school and the dynamic duo had not seen much of one another - they had so much stock pre made there was no reason to meet up.
Then, for reasons which are mystery until this day, one mid-October morning something changed.
Emma rang Hayley and said in a rather concerned voice; “Could you come over?’.
Hayley lived a minute’s drive away but on trying to walk into Emma’s living room she found she couldn’t. There was orders and matchboxes spread out all over the floor and Emma’s phone was making a beeping sound nearly every other minute.
‘It’s an alert I’ve put on my phone’ Emma explained, ‘It’s been like that all morning.’
‘Is it this Notonthehighstreet advertising us?’ asked Hayley, wondering if she could pop over to their offices and tell them to stop this instant for fear of running out of stock and packaging.
‘No, the catalogue is not out until next week. I’ve no idea why this is happening’ said Emma
patiently. ‘but we do need to make more Hot stuff, get more stamps, order more jiffy envelopes, and my printer is going to run out of ink’.
However, the real horror was that following week was half term and it had been arranged for Hayley to take over whilst Emma had her kids at home.
Emma gave Hayley a crash course and all the while the orders were building up. By the end of the day there were well over 200 and it was quite a task to process before the school pick-up.
Hayley had to drive round three post boxes to get rid of them all and was very thankful that stamps now came pre glued.
