Day 2 of #meetthemakerweek is about inspiration for the product. I’ve always loved having an advent calendar. First, of course there were the cheap supermarket ones with tiny milk chocolate shapes, this was the standard for many many years. ✨

Then, especially since I was in a relationship, we created custom-made calendars for each other with my (now) husband. I remember one year, I got a calendar with origami folded pockets, each with a short quote from the Game of Thrones books and a chocolate from Thornton’s. ✨

Later I had one with only Niederegger marzipan squares. I also created calendars for him, sometimes with chocolate, sometimes with fun activities. ✨ This red-white-green crochet calendar was also handmade by me in 2014. I wanted something that we can keep and refill each year with whatever we come up with. ✨

And in 2015, I quite frankly fell down the craft chocolate rabbit-hole 😄. Starting in Belgium, where we spent 9 months, then coming back to the UK and attending as many chocolate fairs as possible, plus a short trip to Switzerland, and my stash just got to an unmanageable size (still happening 🙄). And it was just so natural to dig into it and fill up the calendar with some of those bars. I loved it! Every evening we sat down, opened the little foiled pieces and tried to guess what they were. I posted them here on IG and many people loved the idea, some started their own versions too. And since then, I just kept doing this each year. ✨

I was browsing to see if any bigger company had done something like this, but I couldn’t find any. So after launching my little retail business I took a big step by starting to work on this dream project in January 2018.