Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
Here is the latest excerpt from Iain’s guest blog series charting his aims to build a socially responsible candle company working with disabled people. To find out more about his project you can read about it here on my Guest Beekeeping Blog Page. I hope you enjoy his latest post….he is on an amazing journey.
Getting a stall at some of the London craft markets can be quite tricky! At first we wanted to get a pitch at Covent Garden, which as most people will know is in the heart of London’s west end and a popular tourist destination. We duly went and spoke to the market manager, who was very nice and seemed supportive of a social enterprise making candles in London from locally sourced beeswax but, we would need to fill in the application form.
Well I have never seen an application form quite so complicated, even when applying to work for the Royal Household the application form and process were not as complicated. Her Majesty and MI5 could learn a thing or two!!
Firstly the application form itself asked many detailed questions, then we had to send in CVs along with photos of us; write two essays about our products, one on the technical of how the Candles are made, the other about the candles in general. We then had to send a price list and finally create a DVD with images of the products themselves with a brief description of each product.
All this was just part ONE of the application process! If we were successful there would be more to come!!
All this had to be submitted to a committee that meets once a quarter. So it was duly submitted…..
The committee had met, about a month previously, but they had forgotten to let us know their decision. After all that the answer came back NO.
As you can imagine we were crest fallen. We had a great product that was locally sourced and locally made by a social enterprise that was also environmentally friendly, what was there not to like?
It turns out that there was an other person selling candles at the market. Even though their candles are mass-produced using lots of artificially produce chemicals and wax from the petrochemical industry.
