Hello, it's me, Alice - creator of Alice in Scandiland, a lifestyle and homewares shop and journal, based in Cornwall, in the UK.
I'm currently all cosy in bed, avoiding the day really starting and I thought I'd begin a little throw back, to give a sense of the why and how I started my accidental brand. Perhaps this is as much for me as it is for you. Small business life in the UK is all kinds of different these days, so many external factors have poured down on us over the past few years and I think it’s good to look back and reconnect with the roots of something you’ve created, when the original spark feels like such a long time ago now.
The Alice in Scandiland Shop first opened it’s “doors” 5 years ago this month, in it’s first iteration, an Instagram shop - run from my garden shed.
I'll be writing a mini journal series about the origins of the shop. I find it so hard to prioritise time to write these days, so a few snippets, spread across a week or so, seems more manageable and hopefully will be a bridge back to writing here more frequently. I really hope so, I miss this place a lot.
I guess in a way this is for those of you who are new around these parts, I hope you enjoy the little insight into how it all began. For those that have been here a while, apologies for any repetition, but I do think it's fun to look back and reminisce from time to time, especially with a before and after vibe going on.
The blog started in 2015, I was a SAHM and was looking for something for myself, an escape from the day to day, a place to share our home and the journey we were on in my own way.
After thoughts of moving, and the reality of what that would cost in a county like Cornwall, we made the choice to commit to where we were, a slightly too small for us, nothing particularly outstanding, late 60s end of terrace. We didn't personally want to sign ourselves up to more debt, for the sake of an only slightly bigger floor plan or the possibility of being detached. We wanted to be free of mortgage pressures asap.
Instead, we embarked on making the home we were in work extra hard for us and our 2 children. I talk some more about this on a post I wrote in 2018, Our House, For Us.
I’ve just had a little look back over that piece and so much has changed again, in the house, as well as my feelings towards it. That’s what I used to love about writing here, the comparison over time. I am so settled here, the changes and improvements we continue to make have made this such a wonderful place to live and the security of not overstretching ourselves, back when thoughts of moving came up, has been so reassuring during all the ups and downs these past few years.
My interior style had been developing over time and the push to create more space brought with it an appreciation for natural tones and materials, leggy furniture - giving a sense of more floor space, less clutter and more conscious decisions about what we had and why.
I'd share the vintage finds I got at flea markets and fairs, carboots and on Marketplace and my followers, both on the blog and Instagram, engaged so well with those posts.
Everyone loves a vintage treasure!
The extension, which I designed to pull the (at that time yet to be redesigned) garden into the house & connect us more with unutilised space, was one of our most important and to this day, life changing decisions for the house and our lives within.
Finally we could breathe out properly, no longer feeling like we were living on right top of each other.
This change to the dynamic of our space definitely helped to propel my "brand" to a new level, my following grew, I had more to share and with it an even greater interest from my audience in how we were furnishing the space, the choices I was making, the one-off pieces I would find.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was already building a relationship with my future customer base, conducting valuable market research, by accident, just through how we were choosing to live our lives and how I shared it.
