Happy Christmas, Seasons greetings, happy holidays, whichever is appropriate to all of our customers and friends and family, from myself, Michele, and the team of part time employees and the High st office staff. Thank you for your fantastic support this year. I know we have been turning away work since mid-October and so just a brief explanation for those who aren't aware of the reasons.
I learnt more than I appreciated at the time when I was listening to the sound advice many years ago of R W Wren* the eminent horologist who was then in his shop in Hastings.
His advice at the time included running down the acceptance of new jobs in October as I best recall. The reasoning was that it was better to try to clear the decks of existing jobs, rather than not complete either new or old jobs due to the shortage of time.
This year I have unfortunately turned away a few who wanted their watches done as gifts, but I still feel that the second part of the advice, which was that a large bill just before Christmas is not welcomed, still holds validity today.
Hopefully next year more of the time at the end of the year can be allocated towards refurbishing shop stock rather than the projects we have undertaken this time around, although the stress free period has allowed the integration of eBay stock onto the website, in an effort to prepare for any disasters when eBay make good their threats to make our items not appear in their search due to non-compliance. I see they are thinking of backing down on the threats they made to those using watermarked images, due no doubt to larger eBayers' pressure, but the Google Chrome browser https issue is still in existence.
The eBay items are in our Watch spares category and totally unrelated to Smiths. This is a move I deeply regret as it waters down the "message" and clutters the internal search and we may well yet allocate them space on a fresh website in the new year.
All the best and a Happy New Year to you all.
* R W Wren was originally apprenticed to The Wren family business AWS in Hastings, and there is a link to him on our contacts page. AWS held the distributorship of many of what are now considered highly collectable sporting watch brands and hopefully Robert can soon post a list of them on his website.