It’s been a busy few weeks, but I’m proud to say we’re now fully moved into our new home!
I started the business from my bedroom 8 and half years ago. After a couple of years, I started to get tired of having bins of sporrans under my bed, piled up at the window, all over my desk and covering nearly all the empty floor space. I needed more space so I took out a small unit at our local Safestore self storage company.
We used that unit for a year or so, and then over the following years we expanded out into a larger unit, and then into one of their offices, and so on, until we had 4 offices across 2 floors. We stayed like that for a couple of years, and it worked pretty well. However, as is inevitable with a growing company, we started to fill that space and were feeling the pain of having some people upstairs and others downstairs.
I began to look for alternatives around Edinburgh and spotted a property that I’d seen a couple of years before, but had been too big for us at the time. Almost as soon as I saw it advertised, I felt that this was the next step for us.
It is owned by the local council and the tenants at the time had handed in their notice, so the closing date for offers was just a week away, with a potential move in date a few weeks after that. We got together and had a chat about whether we should put in an offer, weighed up the pros and cons, and decided to go for it.
It was then a tense week waiting for the council to get back to us and find out if we’d been selected for the lease. When I did find out, I tried to remain calm and professional on the phone while I was jumping around and shouting! We found out on the 7th August with a proposed move in date in early September so only had about 3 weeks to prepare for the move.
We quickly got busy planning everything and making preparations for the big move. We ended up getting the keys on the 10th September and spent a week doing some prep in the new location, before doing the big move over the weekend of the 15th September. I’m proud to say that on Monday 17th September, just a week after getting the keys, we’d moved our considerable amount of stock, all our desks and computers, our sound system and all our little bits and bobs, and began trading from our new address.
Our new place is almost exactly 4 times the size of our previous location, and most importantly, it’s all on one level. Now we’ve got our warehouse packing table right outside our office so it makes it much easier to shout through and check what’s happening, or just have a quick bit of banter. We’ve also got a great big loading bay to make it easier for delivery vans to come and go.
A few weeks in and we’re all happy with our new home. Within just a couple of days, I started to wonder how we managed with so little space and couldn’t imagine having to move back into our old offices. I think that’s a sure sign that we made the right call.
The producers of the advert ran into a problem when shooting the advert; Our budget 8 yard kilts were just too heavy to be blown up and were unable to feature in the advert. These kilts are usually worn for casual or formal events, where you definitely don’t want to reveal what’s under your kilt!
