AW Artisan Wholesale Giftware

Greetings from Kathmandu, Nepal, where I am taking on the mafia. Last week was crazy, we kicked off with our 29th Birthday celebrations.. AW is 29 years old. 29 years since I sold my first bottle of Lavender Oil on a Sheffield Street market. Since then it's been beyond busy in all our warehouses, the elfs are struggling to keep up - but we will find a way. Anyway I'm on the way home for Christmas (Erm the long way).. On Wednesday I said goodbye to Ringo and Bondhan as they dropped me off at Denpasar airport, I took a Malaysian airways flight to Kuala Lumpur arriving late evening, slept in the most comfortable bed you can imagine at the Sama-Sama airport hotel (short walk and a buggy ride), and early morning checked in for the flight to Kathmandu. Just about the smoothest, trouble free, friendly people, nice food.. best experience ever. Sometimes I love traveling in Asia.   Even as we approached the airport it seemed like the wings were almost touching the magical mountain...

Greetings from Bali, Indonesia. Last week I was explaining why we bought a Buddha oven. If you missed it you can catch up here . Malaga survives! It's raining, it's pouring .. massive storms in Spain. Our warehouse is in the epicentre.. lots of damage in Malaga as an unbelievable amount of rain falls. Toni and the team were ordered to take the day off on Wednesday. On Thursday they came to work to discover part of the roof blown off, water flooding the floor and so we have suffered some water damage.  But they guys got to work cleaning up and sorting out damages, they were picking orders by 10am and like the rest of Malaga picking themselves up and getting on with it.  Despite the sighting of a massive tornado off the coast of Marbella and huge winds, my house on the coast survived unscathed, and on Thursday morning at 4am I'm calling all my friends there to make sure they are ok.. it seemed ok but with some lucky escapes. Thank God. Then yesterday - after work back to my v...

Greetings from Bali, Indonesia. Yes, I am here on my way back to Europe. Raul, our IT wizard, is here and there are lots of things happening. The marketing world is changing so fast.. Last week I was telling you about my one day delayed flight and the conspiracy guy who managed to almost cause a riot. If you missed it you can catch up here . My observation is this..  That guy who kept coming up with conspiracies (they cancelled our flight to consolidate it etc), became the natural group leader by making people feel angry and untrusting. There in action was the simple truth.. Conspiracies are the way to hack democracy.. so that's why we have Trump.02. All changes in marketing. But maybe I was a bit unfair to the guy..  An apology. The next day in the Red Fox Hotel near the airport.. they gave us a coach transfer back to the airport. Everyone on our flight was milling around in the lobby. I had decided from experience to avoid the coach transfer. Too many mosquitoes, smells and ...

Greetings and Namaste from the Red Fox hotel Delhi. I hope you had a fun-filled Halloween! I didn't plan to be here (in Delhi today) but things happen that you don't expect. (see below). Little North/South correction. Last week I was telling you about our very peaceful time in North Goa.. If you missed it you can catch up here ... as my good friend in Goa quickly spotted, I had made a big mistake! My humble apologies.. I should have written South Goa. South Goa is peaceful and still underdeveloped, North Goa is like an Indian version and more hectic version of Benidorm. Party zone and noisy. They still have beautiful beaches (so I'm told) but not as tranquil and unspoiled as you can find in the South.  We have this system where we invite our suppliers to visit us in Goa, they stay at the hotel we use and can bring only a limited range of samples. In peace and quiet we can carefully access the goods, make our modifications, organise our design team and then.. after making ou...