Sometimes, 'wrong' can become 'right' in the blink of an eye, especially in business. Join us as we recall a harrowing period of continuous production, sleepless nights, empty post offices, broken printers, and a chilli order that raised eyebrows...
8. The one with…the “wrong” order
Half-term came and went (almost without incident) and Hayley and Emma spent every waking hour filling hundreds of tiny bottles with super hot chilli.
Hayley’s mum, who came for a restful visit, spent it folding leaflets. Nice.
Go mum!!
By this stage, over 200 orders were coming in every day. Hayley was cleaning up all the local post office’s stock of first class stamps and spent her evenings driving round filling up all the local post boxes with orders.
Emma was spending most of her time trying to source jiffy envelopes.
“At this rate we’ll need at least 2000 a week!” screamed Hayley – (she did a lot of screaming in this period),
Meanwhile, Hayley and Emma spent every waking hour filling hundreds of tiny bottles with super hot chilli.
Hayley’s partner started to answer the enquiries as delays and minor snafus crept in as the well oiled machine began to creak a little at the hinges.
He also printed off the orders at his office as both Emma’s and Hayley’s home printers had conked out.
With production ramping up, another £20,000 was borrowed from Emma’s husband and he made a projection sheet charting how much time and money was needed if orders did not slow up - spoiler alert, they didn’t!
So much so that after Emma placed another order the supplier replied;
‘There’s been a mistake – your last order was for 2000 bottles but this time you have asked for 20,000?’.
The chilli supplier was rather quiet when Emma demanded 4 kilos of each of his hottest chillis.
‘Errr, may I ask, what are you going to do with it?’
Not without good reason,as this stuff was also a popular ingredient in home-made bombs!
