David's AW News: Homeward Bound

Greetings from Bali on my last hours here.

I'm at the airport in Bali.. Quickly writing this before my flight.

It's time to head back to the UK.

Last week I was telling you about our 30th Anniversary of the founding of Ancient Wisdom. I recalled the very first day of trade on a Sheffield street market - 30 years ago. (If you missed it you can catch up here).

The events of that day have kind of fallen into folk law status at AW. How it was a total disaster and almost gave up. But fortunately, I didn't, and here we are today.

We ran a 30-hour 30% discount starting at 9.30am on Sunday.. across all our websites. And it was astounding it felt like we almost broke the internet.

Thank you everyone for kind words and congratulations. And thank you for your continued trust and trade.

Then of course, the next day all our websites collapsed for real when the worldwide Cloudflare downage hit. We are thanking the gods of the internet that it didn't happen during the 30 hour promo.  That would have been catastrophic.

Well, the wheels keep turning and things move on. Tomas and Raul are in Bali with me and they are working to expand our IT team here.

I have been helping but mostly working with our man in Indonesia Bondhan, who manages the warehouse and container dispatches.. There is an ongoing problem in Bali, the pool of Artisans who make our products - not just ours but for the local market and to countries all over the world - every classy gift shop from Scarborough to Sanfansisco has handcrafted artisan products from Bali.

They call it the "creative industry" . There is a government minister devoted to it and it's a significant export market for Indonesia. When I first came to Bali 12 years ago, they recorded that of the 4 million population of Bali a million - 25% - were involved in the Creative Industries.  Now, of the data I can find, they calculate that now it is less than 400,000 less than half. We can feel the effects, our suppliers complain of not enough workers and it takes longer to fulfil orders, prices rising and stock shortage of the most artisanal products.

Anyway, I have been doing some investigating, learning the reasons why.. and I'm working on a new YouTube video to explain this. Stand by.

Meanwhile, in the warehouse, it's been CRAZY busy.. With no let up.. NEW brilliant stock arriving that I'm so excited to see...

Hope you are keeping warm in the big chill, and trade is good!

Take care and an update from the UK next week.

David