Hello! Jenny here!

Been a while since I chatted to you guys as I do more and more stuff behind the scenes now – you’ll be used to reading this in Colettes voice haha! I wanted to give you a little update on what’s been happening at Sew Confident.

First of all I really want to thank each and every one of you for your support over the past 7 and a half years! I can’t believe we’ve been on the go for that long! As you know we’ve started replicating the Sew Confident studio vibe via franchising with the lovely Sandra in Dundee and Dawn in Chorley. We’ve got another one in the pipeline but it’s top secret SORRY – ask me in person and I might crack though! I love what the business has become, I love meeting you all and befriending most of you, and I love that we’re managing to share the sewing bug with so many new people all over the UK!

With growth comes challenges of course. Every business has them and unless you’re Colette, Rosey or my long suffering partner Steve, you won’t know about most of them( I am a problem solver by nature so I’m hard wired to find creative solutions, that’s basically my job! No complaints here!). Our biggest one is a bit of a double edged sword called VAT. Vat is a 20% tax the government put on to goods and services. To most businesses it makes no difference because you claim back the VAT on the goods that you buy in and then you pay it on the goods you sell but for service based businesses like ours it’s a bit tricky because we don’t buy in very much to claim anything back!

In the UK you only start paying VAT once your turnover tips over a certain amount. So in essence every Sew Confident Class up until now has been VAT free you lucky things! However now that we’re approaching the VAT threshold we have no choice but to start charging VAT on all our classes. I’m going to blame the big bad government for this as it’s their tax rules not mine(and in my opinion the system doesn’t work at all for service based businesses like mine but hey that’s a blog post for another day)!

The only positive I can take from this is that growth is good. This may be a hurdle that has been playing on my mind for months but I know we’ll be able to get right over it and hopefully you guys will understand how this is something we just can’t avoid. With growth of course means things like new job creation, better service offering, more classes and better chocolate biscuits haha! I thought the best thing to do here was to be completely transparent and give you a sneaky peak of the serious business side of Sew Confident.

It’s not all bad though as we have decided to give you all mega advance warning of the price increase. We’ve also scheduled classes waaaaay into the future (2020 here we come!) so that you can still bag yourself a class at VAT free pricing even into next year (Can’t see what you’re looking for? Email us). So get your calendar out and take advantage of VAT free prices before they increase on 1st October.

I should add this is only in the Glasgow Studio so Dundee and Chorley are still footloose and VAT-free!