Chocolala launches!

• 11th Jun ’07 at 09:35 BST
• By Niladri
• 2 comments

Phew, we’ve made it.

Welcome to the chocolala website. It’s been a bit of a journey getting this far… scary, challenging and with us having to make some tough decisions along the way. But it’s also been fantastic. We’ve met some extraordinary people, laughed lots, and learned how to pilot more skilfully from the seat of our pants.

The big news is that you can now buy our chocolates online from the new chocolala shop. Hoorah. We think it’s fab. As with most online shops, you can order a tin of our chocolates and have them delivered (to yourself or to someone else) along with a message if you’d like one. However, you can also buy several tins and have them sent to as many recipients as you want (…well, up to one recipient per tin!)… you can even choose when, over the next few weeks, each tin is sent out… ALL IN ONE ORDER!!! So if you’ve got a whole load of birthdays, anniversaries, other celebrations, thanks, or pre–planned apologies coming up over the next month, you can get them all sorted in one short session online… the busy internet-shopper’s dream.

Oh, and if you’re local, you can also order your chocolala chocolates online but collect them from Hebden Bridge, saving yourself the postage.

Enough shop talk. Enormous thanks to the highly skilled boys at Grow Collective (our web designers) for all their hard work and patience and humour.

Although working at chocolala is mainly about being splattered with chocolate whilst remaining glamorous, it’s not all plain sailing. Some of the most difficult decisions we’ve had to make over the last 6 months have been around trying to make chocolala a viable business (rather than just a nice thing to do). After much consideration, we’ve decided to limit the range of chocolates we make (to start with at least) and to sell just one product, the regular chocolala tin. It is (in our very biased opinion) completely gorgeous and, having just one product, avoids any options anxiety.

For us the sadness of this is that we don’t have a dairy free/vegan tin on offer at the moment… It is top of our list for phase 2 (…the timescale will depend partly on how much we’re pestered, but mainly on the state of our bank account).

As well as our shop, there’s also the chocoblog. This is our first posting, hopefully the first of many. We’ll be using the blog to keep you in touch with what’s happening on the chocolala front, but also to share other stuff… like our recent trip to see Aiden Quinn and his ecopod or some thoughts on the importance of human fallibility (hmmm… bet you can’t wait for that one).

It may be a couple of weeks before we’re posting regularly on the blog as the lovely Grow boys tell us they’re still working on the back end… we’re not completely sure what this means, but are wondering if they’re rehearsing for an alternative life in panto.

And finally… what you could do to help us

*Nick and Niladri try not to squirm too much*

If you want to buy copious amounts of our chocolates, that would be great… but we’re not trying to pressurise anyone into that. However, there are other things we’d like to pressurise you into, if you don’t mind:

• If you’d like to be given some of our chocs, please make sure your friends, relatives and colleagues know… make subtle hints, tell them outright, e-mail them a link to our site and a shopping list, or sit with them and guide them through making an online order.
• We don’t have any money for advertising and we’re hoping that people will get to hear about us by word of mouth. Please tell absolutely everyone you know about us, in person or over the ’net. And if you have your own website or blog, it would be great if you mentioned chocolala or had a link to our site.
• And if you work in the media (or have all the right contacts) and could organise an article, a review, or some suitable exposure that won’t cost us our souls, drop us a line and we’ll ply you with chocolates!

That’s more than enough for now!

We hereby launch chocolala. May all who travel with her, or watch from the shore, enjoy and go well.

Nick and Niladri