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Hi,
Baukjen here. Last weekend was my 40th birthday. It was such a wonderful weekend. The evening before my birthday we had a “dinner party” with our children. The table was beautifully laid, lots of candles were lit, the fireplace was on and we had lovely food. It couldn’t have been more perfect. My birthday started off with a lovely family breakfast filled with sentimental presents. Amongst my favourites were various things that used to belong to my grandmother and presents that the children had spent days making. Another favourite was a fabulous new bedding set from the White Company (The Berkley range – which has made getting up in the mornings very difficult!). Afterwards we went for a very long walk in the park and in the evening we went for dinner at Claridges. Gorgeous food, wonderful service but their wine menu is presented on the iPad. We are iPad fans but not for this. But besides that, it was the a perfect end to a perfect day. Not to exclude friends, we’ll be having a party with friends soon to celebrate my birthday. The next day it was back to work and there we enjoyed the biggest cake I’ve ever had. Despite the efforts of everyone, the cake was nowhere near finished and so today people were still eating it. A big thank you to the team for the lovely present and chocolate cake (see picture)! And also thank you to everyone who sent messages and flowers – it really made this birthday very special.
It’s half term here in the UK and I had promised our eldest son Oliver (of Isabella Oliver – we named the company after the eldest children of the original founders) that he could come to the office one morning. So this morning he came to the office with us. He was a bit shy in the midst of so many women. He wanted to practice maths at my desk and our PA kindly put a plate of chocolate biscuits next to him with a cup of tea. It’s perhaps not unexpected that he absolutely loved being at “the office” and now wants to come with us every morning. Oliver got stuck at one point with some subtraction sums and whilst I tried to talk him through them, he didn’t understand. Our HR manager jumped in and explained it herself to him and that was that, he understood.
On the Isabella Oliver front, we’ve all been very busy, as always.
While the current collections are doing very well and are keeping teams such as the Fulfilment and Customer Services teams very busy, quite a few of us are working on the Spring Summer 2011 launches. There’s still an enormous amount of work to be done but we are excited about the collections and new ideas and we can’t wait to share! There’s a lot in store for you, we hope you will love…
We are also deep in the design process of Autumn Winter 2011 and, as always, I’d like to wear it all now (they say “Patience is a virtue”, unfortunately it is not one of mine…) Today we launched Rebekah Roy’s 7 Days of Chic video on the Isabella Oliver 365 website . A big thank you to Rebekah for making the time! We have another one coming up soon for Isabella Oliver 365. Unfortunately the one we had filmed for maternity (with a pregnant friend of mine) needed to be reshot as some of the footage was a bit too dark lighting-wise. So we had it all planned out to shoot again and then I received an email from my friend that she had unexpectedly gone in to labour early and has since given birth to a gorgeous son. Many, many congratulations to her and her family!
On a different note, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has emailed me feedback, thoughts etc on Feedback2Baukjen@IsabellaOliver.com I’ve really appreciated it and it helps us to do what we do better. Thank you and please continue to share your suggestions, thoughts and feedback.
Have a lovely week, Baukjen