Firstly, we hope you’ve had a great Christmas and New Year! We wouldn’t be here without you and we are truly grateful to each and every one of you for your continued support.
Unfortunately, we haven’t had the greatest of festive seasons, and while we’re not here to seek sympathy, we need to explain some of the changes forced on us as we start 2024.
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have seen stories pertaining to one of our now former customers ceasing to trade suddenly and with immediate effect. Notwithstanding the impact on the employees and local community which is simply awful, to us, their closure represents a significant loss of hope that unpaid invoices will ever be settled and more importantly, we are unlikely to have important and expensive equipment returned to us.
We also had some rather devastating health news relating to a member of the CloudGate family. While we won’t go into much detail for risk of over-sharing, Steve will be taking a step back from CloudGate for a period of time to fight an all-too-familiar battle. We wish him and his family well and look forward to a time in the not-too-distant future when he will be back with all the drive and creativity that only he can bring to our brand.
Why are we telling you this? Well, for the above reasons, we are having to make some changes for a short time. We’re not giving up on our quest to be more sustainable and we still believe that cans and corks are the best way to pack and store coffee, but unfortunately for now we’re making the switch back to bags until we can replace equipment and manpower.
We will also revert to shipping from Haworth not Thirsk which means that North Yorkshire deliveries will be done by post rather than by hand delivery. We are still aiming to introduce pick up points in 2024 and will let you know more as soon as we have it.
We’re not giving up, and we’re not going anywhere. We still believe that the best coffee should be available to everyone and we are resolute that coffee should be a better cleaner industry. We still see a bright future and we still see growth in 2024, this is just a pause to take a breath before we go again.