On the 11th March 2024, I formally launched my antiques business and this website. I did this with great excitement and optimism for the future, especially as it always feels like a great sense of achievement starting up your own business, and of course a website. This was in conjunction with trying to continue my academic career, considering that I am recent PhD graduate in Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge. I do remember showing off this website to the fellow alumni of my old Cambridge college, during a formal drinks event at the Oxford and Cambridge club, on the day it was launched. All of them thought the website was very nice, especially the items on sale, and wished me all the encouragement to continue the business and make it grow.
However, the past eight months have been an extremely difficult period in my life. I did not anticipate how hard and complex maintaining a web-based business was. I had little knowledge about digital marketing then, especially that there are many different types of it, like Search Engine Optimisation, and also drawing up the right posts on social media platforms. To help partly resolve it, I undertook a digital marketing course, although this will only be the starting point, and I still have lots of learning to do. I could not devote as much time as I would have liked in maintaining the website, uploading new stock and market it on social media, due to various problems and issues in my private life. That is whilst also trying to maintain my academic career. As I thought my life could not get any worse, I recently suffered a major traumatic injury, an open fracture, due to a freak accident. This required emergency surgery and left me in hospital for nearly one week. It now requires many months of rehabilitation and recovery according to the orthopaedic surgeon who kindly spent 4.5 hours in reconstructing my patella bone, so that I would have a chance to walk again.
Despite these setbacks, and other difficulties, when I sometimes wonder what the meaning of life is, I have decided to try my best in not letting this get to me. I will now try my hardest to finally get this business off the ground and expand it whilst also continuing my academic work. There will be lots of changes. Recognising the fact that it is very hard and time consuming to do everything with a website, I have appointed an IT consultant called Josh of https://tegosec.com/index.php/author/thejostler/ , to improve and beautify the website. He has plenty of very good and interesting ideas for the website, and I look forward to working with him. I have also commenced a business course to further update and expand my business skills. There will be new lots of new and interesting stock that will be added, from ancient Oriental antiques to the more modern art and toys. Lastly, there will also be educational posts about antiques and collectables.
Thank you to you all for viewing this website, and reading this post, as well as for your support. I very much look forward to helping you find the antiques and collectables that you are interested in adding to your collections, as a stand-alone piece of art or interesting item to display in your house, or as a gift for friends and family. That is hopefully in the coming months and years. Not only on this website, but also on other platforms such as eBay and Etsy.
Best wishes to you all,
Chris