2 pairs of BrightByBlack.co.uk gloves have been deemed by the Daily Mail's fashion editorial team as wonderful enough to be featured in '9 of the Best Elbow Length Gloves'. Wow.  I figured out [with the cerebral agility of a Stephen Hawkings-type brain] that what that means is that a whopping 22% of the best elbow length gloves out there in the world are ours. Happy thought.

On Friday night at around 10:30 I arrived back from holiday into Gatwick's North Terminal. Joy and rapture. Because, just as our flight touched the ground, so did 11 other flights which meant frantic must get in the fastest queue must get in the fastest queue mania at immigration and then an hour long wait eyeballing the baggage reclaim screen with the apocalyptic zeal of hedge-fund shorter followed by another hour tracking down a cab. It was fun and certainly did justice to a good holiday (see gratuitous blurry Blackberry holiday snap). Ah Espana.

Then came the domestic stuff: unpacking, washing, drying, ironing, shopping and disinfecting the Gaggia. Followed by the work stuff: scrutinising the emails that, days earlier,  I had merely scanned with a glibness of heart and a fluttering of soul. Then yesterday was our management meeting and boom! adrenaline injection what with all the enormous Christmas (yes indeed Christmas) preparation to do, sales reports, traffic reports and so on. Business. Boom!

This morning, however, was my husband's first day back and so begin the 5:30 starts, at desk by 7. As a consequence my days also start this fiendishly early. So I like to break in the day by doing the following:

1. Updating our Twitter page
2. Checking our  Facebook page
3. Analysing our website's traffic for the previous day.

The latter is the most fun.  This is because as well as providing us with vital information about the traffic we get to our site at www.black.co.uk, we also see what terms or keywords people type into Google that lead them to our site. In among the searches for the products we actually sell such as women's scarves, women's scarfs (sic), men's scarves, wraps, pashminas, leather gloves, cashmere throws, cashmere socks* and so on are searches for products and 'things' that we certainly do not sell.

Here are a few gems

1. 'are leather placemats a good idea'
2. 'cashmere mother of the bride'
3. 'bedroom accessories for men'
4. 'i want to buy hair of a black woman'
5. 'straw Robin Hood'

... needless to say there are also searches that should never see the light of day...

The wonders of the internet. Rivalled only by the wonders of the British Aviation Authority.

ps. Are leather placemats a good idea?

* Over-done linking here is at the behest of our SEO guys. Reads easily doesn't it?  

This autumn/winter brings great delight to us given that we are the keenest long leather glove aficionadi going and said gloves are ... wait for it .. so hot right now. We started off four years ago with these, our classic long leather gloves and then added these long suede gloves, and then a pair of these (my erstwhile favourites) until these bad boys came along: long black suede gloves with swarovski crystal scatter. Oh and not forgetting these.

Last month's Vogue Catwalk report devoted a page to arguably one of the most glamorous accessories going:

We've circled a few of our favourites - we've added similar pairs below.

Black Suede Elbow Gloves with Gold Zip

£99

Long Plum Leather Gloves with Button Detail (BrightByBlack.co.uk)

£90

Long Black Satin Lycra Gloves

£45

We have chosen not to have a testimonials page because (from our point of view at least) testimonials can often read as if they have been written by the company itself. We are very lucky indeed to have customers who are incredibly generous with praise for our products and our service and receiving these comments is great for motivating our team.

Every so often, however, we get an email from a customer that stands out for one reason or another. We think that the comment below is especially interesting for our new international customers. Perhaps you live in the US, Australia or Japan and question when your order will get to you and in what timeframe. Our main method of international shipping is with sovereign postal services rather than blue-chip couriers and costs a fraction of those to boot (£13 approx $20). This customer ordered her gloves on the Monday and they arrived on the US West Coast by the Saturday. We were thrilled with the United States Postal Service and can't help feeling that the enormous growth of online shopping has been a contributing factor to their increasing efficiency:

Hello,

I want to thank you for such good service after I placed an order for your Black Bow Cocktail Gloves. The order was placed at the last minute, and I had them sent directly to  my hotel in Portland, Oregon for an evening wedding I was attending last Saturday. The gloves were waiting for me at the front desk when I arrived and are just gorgeous! I had so many compliments from everyone. They looked absolutely elegant with my dress and jacket and really "made" my outfit. And I cannot thank you enough for such prompt service and a wonderful product.

Who am I kidding? Shame on me for skewering my agenda onto unwilling maxims. (See 'Justify my Glove')

Clearly, this is not the weather for long leather gloves. Imagine the result of the sweat/leather alchemy. A & E.

However, this is the platform for promoting our exciting upcoming products.

Today's are no exception: Anthracite and White Swarovski-Crystal Studded Black Suede Leather Gloves, lined with silk. This is the sort of thing that would make the sun shut up shop and humbly make way for the moon. (£199)

Additionally, expect to see these Long Leather Gloves with Leather Trellis Detail and Tassles - also silk-lined. Wear with a Highwayman-esque cashmere cape and a black beret and get on the plane to St Petersburg. TAXI! (£149)

And finally, we must not forget the racier of our glovely customers. Coming soon are these retro Cotton Crochet and Tan Leather Fingerless Driving Gloves. Vroom vroom. (£75)

Stock arriving June/July.  Made in Italy.

Yesterday was Cashmere Day at Black.co.uk. It is an annual event where The Boss and The Buyer leave Black HQ in the pursuit of staple cashmere accessories for our cashmere-crazed Autumn/Winter season. It is a fine event. Very tactile. And if they're lucky they may leave with a goody or two. (Given, not stolen)

Usually The Buyer take lots of pictures as reminders of stuff they've seen, otherwise come ordering  time they resort to staring nonplussed at a reel of mile-long sample codes. Here are some:

Not sure about this. (Scarf not The Boss)

Love these:

Anyway, almost as important as Cashmere Day is the Post-Cashmere Day lunch here:

So The Buyer had a camera full of accessories, but failed to capture lunch. What a fool. They sat at the counter and The Boss had six Cornish Oysters (naturally). The Buyer did not. If food is so impenetrable that it causes a Herculean 25-year old Irish oyster-shell opener to be rushed out of the bar bleeding with his dismembered fingers suspended in a cool-box The Buyer feels it's not Nature's intention for it to be eaten. Worn, however, is another matter.  She would consider losing a finger or two for the sake of a Tahitian Black Pearl. Now there's an idea for some radical viral marketing.

Secretly, when everyone else is going 'when will it ever stop' and 'this is relentless' and 'this is the worst I've ever known it to be' (worth noting here that 'they' aren't talking about my deft conversational skills but rather the recent bad weather) I am on the thrilled side of happy.

'Why [you lunatic]?', you might ask. Because, I might reply, I have these heavenly cashmere mittens

So delightful are they that after writing this entry I plan to write to the Oxford English Dictionary about the worthiness of renaming mittens 'smittens', purely as an economical measure to stop those (i.e. me) who possess them from gushing endlessly about them, thus absenteeing themselves from productive work by writing to the OED and therefore doing NOTHING about our staggering budget deficit. 

Some called me insane. Some called me a maverick. Some had better things to do with their time.

 

 I don’t think I have ever been unable to make it into Black HQ. Nature's wrath, eh?

 

While it currently looks like this where I am in London:

 

It looks like this en route:

 

 

 

 

And like this where I need to be:

 

 

So I have been told to stay where I am.

 

I am not moving until it looks like this:

 

 

Because the last time I went out when it looked like this:

 

 

I lost one of these:

 

 

 

And could not have accounted for the loss felt by its absence, which led me the next day to return to the point where I had lost it; on a hill in the dark, stuck in the thick, treacherous snow and ice, back wheel revving insanely (somehow missed the snow-driving lesson as a youth); to find said glove looking rather like this:

 

 

 

Lesson: If you want to keep your beloved accessories from becoming road kill, do not make any unnecessary journeys. This also applies to anything cashmere-based.