Well, our first birthday has come and gone.  We had a great time – a visit from the Lord Mayor of Canterbury, a lovely feature in April’s Canterbury Index, a picture in the Whitstable Gazette, “mentions” elsewhere and many good wishes from our social networking friends, suppliers and fellow independent businesses. We’re grateful to all of them.

To mark the occasion, we launched our new home-made pink lemonade at a “1st birthday” price of £1.   It was an instant hit and will join apple mojitos as a “special” for the summer.  Meanwhile, our hot, spiced apple may have to stay on the Specials Board for some time yet, judging by the requests to keep it there.

We had a lot of fun with a very special offer of free chocolate to the first ten people to come in on the day and say “Happy Birthday” – with a bonus for people who sang.  Which they did!

Now it’s Easter which means that “Supplier of the Month” has to be The Kentish Chocolate Company which good-naturedly moved heaven and earth to bring us chocolate chickens, bunnies and eggs.  Working with this sort of Kent-based start-up, which puts all the value into high-quality products and keeps its packaging costs down, is exactly what we’re about. And it means that customers are amazed by the value-for-money on such great-looking gifts – the packaging may be minimal, but the effect is still chic.

Looking ahead, we’re moving steadily from coffee and hot chocolate into juices and smoothies.  Our next milestone will be our 5,000^th smoothie.  There’ll be a bonus basket of local produce for the person who buys it – and we’ll be doing a public count down when we’re getting near.

And finally, having started with facebook and twitter, and followed on with foursquare, we’ve launched ourselves on pinterest  – early days but it’s certainly easy to use and a nice way of expressing the brand’s “personality”.  We sometimes wonder whether the virtual world will eclipse the physical one day – but then we remember that using fresh produce to create products in front of our customers will mean that we’ll always be very grounded indeed. We'd be interested to hear others' experiences.

www.63harbourstreet.co.uk

www.facebook.com/63harbourstreet

www.twitter.com/63harbourst

http://pinterest.com/63harbourstreet/pins/

https://foursquare.com/v/63-harbour-street--juices-smoothies-coffee--more/4ef9b2c8a17cdc15b3e542f6

63 Harbour Street - nearly one year old and going strong!

Since 63 Harbour Street’s juicer first whirled into life last April, much has happened.  We've blended over 4,000 smoothies, used bushels of fruit and vegetables (all locally grown or locally sourced) and forged some great relationships with Kent producers.

Our suppliers include Whitstable's greengrocers Hedges, baker My Goodness and Olivesrgood4u.  Further afield we work with The Kent & Sussex Tea & Coffee Company, Little Stour Orchard, which answered our appeal for “single-estate” apples at harvest-time, Jemima's Kitchen and The Kentish Chocolate Company.  Like us, many of these businesses are in their first year.  We're finding our way together and sharing knowledge and skills where we can.

Another discovery has been social networking:  We like creating "limited-edition" juices and smoothies and we buy our products in small, fresh batches.  Twitter and facebook are great for letting people know what's new and we've found producers through them too.  It's a quick, personal approach that seems to work well for a "micro-business".

Some other things we've found:

- Lots of dogs love apples. "A smoothie for me and an apple for him please"  Well, it was news to us...

- Whitstable attracts a truly international crowd. We've had customers from all over the world - literally - in our first ten months. They appreciate really fresh products.  And visitors from coffee-growing countries have a notably professional interest in coffee - the blend, the grind, the Gaggia...

- We have Whitstable regulars too, which is great.  We hoped we would appeal to the resident community as well as to visitors and that seems to be the case.  Loyalty cards are booming...