Astrocal began in 2004. It was during the time I was supposed to be writing for her final dissertation for an MA in Digital Media, that the Moon Calendar was conceived and designed - a fine distraction to put off starting my dissertation. I designed the Moon calendar because I was bored with having the same Moon calendar on my wall year after year and I wanted to show the circularity of the solar and lunar cycles as well as to make it more astrological.
Since then, each year we've designed new products, slowly but surely creating a whole collection. And as the collection grows so has the business side. We ended up living with boxes of stock and packaging in every room until we completely out grew our flat in Hove. We've since moved to an eco cohousing community in Dorset called the Threshold Centre and now have our own office in the communal farmhouse. Perfect.
We have been overwhelmed with how popular our diaries and calendars have been and have had interest and praise for their design from all over the world from Brazil to Japan to Australia. It is an extremely satisfying experience to have such a good response for products that I have designed myself.
We feel very proud of all of the products we produce, particularly The Astro Diary as it brings together art, photography and creative writing from many of our talented friends. What an amazing gift - to be able to produce a diary that includes work just from all our friends. How blessed we are to have such inspiring people around us! We also really appreciate the support and endorsement that Jonathan Cainer has given from the outset as this has helped immensely.
We feel very blessed to love our work as we've built our business around what we love to do. We're both outside people and love to walk the land, connecting to nature. Searching and finding different sacred sites gives us a quest, a focus and has taken us to the most stunning places, where we've had the most amazing experiences. We also love to star gaze and now have a fantastic telescope.
Even though we don't class ourselves as astrologers, astrology is a way of life for us and has been for many years. We run the astrology area at Glastonbury Festival every year with The Wheel of Astrologers, many of whom are our dearest friends who we love to get together with and astro babble. We have a huge amount of respect for the deep insight astrology has given us along our journey through life.
In 2010, Ceri Loxley became a partner in the business. Her main role is to handle all of the mailing out of orders to both individuals and shops. She deals with all of the wholesale orders and also provides ideas and inspiration for new products as well as doing some of the design work herself - an all round job! Her input to the business and the progression to a partnership has allowed us to expand our products even further and we are constantly adding to our range. Having two heads is definitely better than one! So much more gets done.
Astrocal has recently celebrated its 7th birthday, its first Saturn square. So, we've been looking at what works and what doesn't. Structuring time so that it flows more easily. Looking at where we want to take Astrocal in the next 7 years. Astrocal now has a good foundation to build upon so we've decided to expand out to create more lunar and pagan products which will add to our astrological range. We've got all sorts of ideas that we'd like to manifest so watch this space!!!
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| Tina Smale |
Ceri Loxley |
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