Roger has a new home & Bronte is emigrating!

Remember a couple of days ago I wrote about Roger, the gorgeous new hound from the 'Toutous' range by Moulin Roty? Well I'm delighted to say that a lovely customer of mine, Louisa from Redbourn, has bought the first dog! Hurrah! Thank you Louisa...And Katy, our competition winner, was thrilled to hear that she has won the Maileg bunny. She loves Maileg rabbits and has started to collect them for her 2 year old daughter Lauren. Apparently Bronte is an amazing beach suburb in Sydney which was one of the reasons she picked the lovely name. Here is Bronte saying goodbye to her bunny friends before heading off to Sydney herself this afternoon... lucky bunny!

Maileg bunny competition - winner announced!

Congratulations to Katy Robson in Australia who has won our 'name the Maileg bunny' competition. Katy came up with the name 'Bronte' which I really loved because a) it is a pretty name and b) Jane Eyre is my mother's very favourite book.

I have just emailed Katy to tell her she has won but doubt I'll hear from her for a few hours as I think it is the middle of the night over there...

I wanted to thank everyone who entered - we had hundreds of entries! Other favourites included Meg, Clover, Crumble, Freya, Harmony, Florence, Bea, Emily, Beatrice and Emily. They're all such pretty names aren't they?

So thank you... this has been our first attempt at a competition and I've been delighted with the response.

I have just emailed our web designer about putting together a new competition - this time for a Moulin Roty toy - and will let you know when it's all up and running.

But in the meantime thank you again to everyone who entered and warm congratulations to Katy for her lovely suggestion.

Finally let's have another look at the bunny in question. Ladies and gentleman, meet Bronte....

Meet Roger the hound!

I have spent the day writing descriptions for all my new Moulin Roty toys and uploading them on to the website. Slight frustration in that I can't add images at the moment - just a little blip and I'm sure my web designer will sort it out in the next couple of hours - but on the whole it's been a lovely day, working through the new toys one at a time, sitting them on the desk in front of me and writing little descriptions.

I think my favourite might be Roger the hound. He is so soft and quirky, I just love him. (He is sitting on my lap as I type, peering over the keyboard!) His fur is the same as Lola bunny's, and he has a little patch on his arm in the same fabric as Nini mouse's dress (I love spotting the themes between the toys) but he a creature all of his own with his lovely long snout and crazy dangly limbs.

At £50 he is fearsomely expensive but I know someone out there will love him...

I have other favourites too but I'll put them into a different post. I feel Roger deserves this one to himself.

New premises & new toys!

Oh dear, sorry again for yet another long gap between posts - although I think relocating business and moving house in the same month is a relatively decent excuse... But the good news is that things have settled down now so hopefully I'll have more time for the little extras like writing on here.

Cottontails has now officially moved into the new garden office! Naturally the electrics / phone / broadband etc took about three times as long as predicted so we haven't been here long but so far it is proving to be a beautiful, peaceful place to work.


We keep some of the smaller items and soft toys in the office, with the bigger items and things in bulk held in a separate storage facility nearby. It's useful to have the toys on hand like this as I get calls most days from customers wanting some specific bit of information - like the length of a bunny's ears or the exact pattern on a mouse's dress - so it's good to have the things in front of me, where I can pick them up and handle them, and not too far away in a warehouse.


This is where most of the packaging takes place. Because it's Sunday and I've just tidied up it is looking particularly neat and tidy. Normally it is awash with parcel tape and brown paper!


And here's Humphrey hard at work in the office :-) He comes out with me every morning and I love my walk down the garden with a bunny under my arm and a cup of coffee in my hand. We have builders working on the house at the moment and I'm sure they think I'm mad!

I have lots of news to tell you about over the next few days. We have just received one of our biggest ever orders from Moulin Roty, jam packed with gorgeous new toys like sew your own dollies and build your own wooden toys, some lovely new boxed soft toys, loads of play kitchen bits and bobs like tiny wooden coffee grinders... oh they're all lovely! I will be putting them on the website this week and will write more about them as I do.


Staying with Moulin Roty we have some very exciting news about a range of their toys which is going to be available in the UK exclusively through Cottontails! And also how we are going to be working with them to offer their entire range through our website. More about this soon...

Also this week I will be picking a winner from our Maileg bunny competition, launching a new one and also getting our first 'giveaway' underway. So plenty to look out for, and plenty of reasons for me to write regular entries and not disappear for months at a time!

New Cottontails HQ

If you've been following the diary, you'll know that there have been some major changes at Cottontails lately, not least the closure of the high street shop and relocation of the business to Herefordshire. Although we took over new storage facilities straight away, there has been a delay in arranging the office space, and for the past few weeks I have been working from a temporary office in the house (i.e. the spare bedroom). And so I am thrilled that the new - permanent - garden office has just been put up. It'll be a few days yet before I can 'move in' as we are awaiting electrics, telephone and carpets, and there's a lot of landscaping to do outside too, but all the same the light is at the end of the tunnel and I can't wait to take over the new head quarters (or 'head hutch' as Mike, my partner, calls it!)It is a kind of moving in gift from Mike and I am so grateful to him (mind you he would be the first to admit that it's as much about keeping me out of the way as anything else!) He works from home too you see (he is a cider maker) and neither of us are even used to sharing a living space, let alone working together. It has a lovely, peaceful view over the barley fields too:
I am feeling very positive and lucky. It was hard and scary to close the shop, but with the new website and now the new 'head hutch' I feel things are really coming together.

Nice feedback on the new website

It's been four full days since we launched the new website now, and so far I'm really happy with the results. Sales have been good, problems have been few and we've had some really nice comments. When customers place an order with us there is a field for 'How did you hear about Cottontails?' and, over the weekend, several new customers have mentioned the website, completely unprompted. Like this one from Holly in Norway:

Google search for UK companies supplying
Maileg bunnies! I liked your website :o)

I'm chuffed by the interest in the competition too - so far we have had twenty-something entries and some really lovely name suggestions. I am going to start a Moulin Roty competition soon too and will post about it here when I do.

That's it for now. Am having a very relaxed week - still working hard on orders and enquiries and so on, but not asking much more than that of myself. It's nice. And it means I have time to write on here!

Win a Maileg bunny!

To celebrate the new website we are running a competition to win this Maileg bunny - all you have to do is visit the Maileg page on the website and suggest a name for her. We will then pick our favourite name from the suggestions and send out a bunny to the winner!