Shopping small and supporting independent businesses

We’re really happy to have been invited by Common Ground to have a stall at their event on the 8th March, which is celebrating International Women’s Day.

As a female founded (and run) business ourselves, we love this. And it got us thinking…

Totally by chance (but mostly because they make and create amazing products), almost all of our stock is from female led creators. Imagine that! It’s not because we seek it out, but because we go for the what and the how (eco, original, lovely etc), and it appears that a lot of people creating are women.

This isn’t going to turn into a feminist rant (to which we are sometimes prone), but many small creative businesses are run by women. It’s easy to dismiss them as ‘part time’ or 'for show’ (which I’m sure some people do), but we think what it actually is is that women are sometimes prepared to just do something when they feel passionately about it and to passionately create and sell their products…

We’ve also noticed that many of these businesses are leaders in the eco states: they are looking to reduce plastic, to create sustainable packaging and ethically sourced goods, and have been for way longer than it’s been a trend like going vegan or dry January (thank God that’s over for another year…!).

So we thought on this note, and planning forwards for this event, we’d introduce you to a few of the amazing female founded (and led) companies that we are proud to stock on our website, as well as shining a little spotlight on their amazing products. Look, we are fundamentally about supporting small independent businesses, and many of these are male led too (our tide clocks, our etched apothecary bottles), but we hadn’t realised until we were asked to celebrate international women’s day, just how female led many of our brands are…

Let’s start with living by the beach… which we do. We live by a lot of beaches, and quite a lot of them are sandy beaches. Our car is essentially a sandpit (two daughters and a love of surf and plus a personal aversion to tidying the car will do that to you).

This amazing beachpowder (£9.99) is an ethical, natural way of getting the sand off. With the effectiveness of talc but with none of the nasties (and absolutely safe to leave behind on the sand). Created in the Isle of Man by Stephanie who realised that even after towel-drying at the end of a day at the beach, the moisture on our skin makes sand stick. She came up with the idea of creating an all-natural, talc-free sand-removing powder made from a mixture of plant and mineral powders that would remove sand very easily.

The combination of plant powders and mineral powders in beachpowder absorbs the moisture without drying out your skin and provides extremely gentle natural exfoliation. The result is that beachpowder leaves the skin totally sand-free and feeling wonderfully silky and smooth! Of course, no trip to the beach would be complete without an ice-cream, so she added vanilla ice-cream scent to the powder so that the smell of your trip to the seaside lingers on the skin even when you’re back at home!

A brilliant idea born out of need, and created to make any trip to the beach easier (with fewer moans), we’re proud to stock it at Harriet and Rose. The packaging (with the exception of the plastic shaker top, which can be recycled after use) is plastic free.

Our second amazing product is Spacemasks, which were first introduced to us by our lovely friend Laura. We’ve since become a bit smitten with Harriet the brains behind the brand (do yourself a favour and follow her on instagram, you will not regret it). Currently the only stockists in Jersey, you can buy them singularly or as a pack of five. These magical (obviously fully recyclable) masks, react with the air once let out of their pouch and heat up for fifteen minutes. As a sufferer of migraines, these really do help. They are portable, they are small, and they are a brilliant way to have a bit of ‘me’ time. Should you ever suffer from a little wine induced headache, these will be your new best friend.

Next up food… Did you know that we do biscuits? Not us personally, we’ve got quite a lot going on without baking for you too (that said, it’s also to do with our lack of backing skills), but we have got an incredibly talented Jersey baker on board creating cakes and biscuits ready for you to consume. Delicious. We can add any message to them, and you can of course request non heart shaped ones (we just went a little bit literal with Valentine’s coming up).

One of our favourite new products is our USB mixtapes. As someone who grew up in the ‘90s, mixtapes puctuataed our friendships and relationships. Another brilliant business founded by a woman, is Blank Records, which combines the modernity of 2020 with the retro vibes of the ‘90s. You can scan in old love letters, add playlists, add in photographs. It’s a really amazing gift perfect for a friend, a big birthday, or just to send love and happy memories in a way that shows you’ve been really, well thoughtful.

Something else we’ve discovered when selecting products to sell on the Harriet and Rose website, is the proliferation of companies ‘giving back.’ From Babies with Love is a social enterprise, with 100% of profits going to help less fortunate children (they’ve been in the news for their brilliance this week after Rachel Riley posed with them to raise awareness… there muslins and toys are all gorgeous and ethically made too), and SevenSeventeen - one of our candle suppliers - gives a % of their profits to mental health charities. When we launched Harriet and Rose, we knew that we wanted to give back too, and 50p from the sale of every card from The Right Lines (another talented female business owner) goes to The Lola Project helping to support parents who have lost a child (no matter at what stage). Spacemasks (already featured above), also have a pink Royal Marsden edition (only available directly through Spacemasks) which gives £1 from every box sold to the Royal Marsden.

So for the event at Common Ground on the 8th March (do come by the way, excellent coffee and cake, and some brilliant talented women selling), our stall will be almost all created by female businesses. Which is exactly how it should be! We look forward to seeing you there.