About Touchable linen
My name is Margarita and I'm from Ukraine.
On November 2nd, 2019, I opened a shop selling natural linen textiles on Etsy. At the time, I had only a few listings for napkins, tablecloths, and towels. By April 12th, 2020, an important event occurred: I celebrated the first 500 sales in the shop. However, things started to become more and more challenging for me because for the first six months, I sewed and processed all the orders myself while working on new products at night. My daughter was three years old at the time, and during breaks between working on orders and communicating with customers, I tried to be a good mother. As the number of customers increased and exhaustion set in, I realized that it was time to seek help, and that's how our team began to form. A little over a month later, I realized that I was on the right track. The number of orders increased, and we were able to process them faster. On May 19th, 2020, we celebrated our second event - 1000 sales in the shop.
Throughout this time, we worked hard, adding new products and improving old ones. In the first year of operation, we received nearly 4,000 sales on Etsy. Our range included table and kitchen textiles, and we added curtains, storage bags, and bed linen. We faced many challenges and achieved many victories, but we always knew where we were going and remembered our values.
We make things that will last for years, using natural fabrics. We do not manufacture stocks of goods that sit and wait for a buyer. Each order is custom-made for each customer. Over 40% of our orders are partially or completely customized products. Therefore, we are always open to anything, whether it's a huge old table that needs a tablecloth or non-standard triangular windows. And as time went by, the number of our clients grew worldwide, and so did we.
But on February 24th, 2022, everything changed. We woke up to terrible explosions and didn't know what to do. On the first day, it was difficult to believe it. I didn't know what to do; I was in shock. I wrote to all my customers about delays in shipping and couldn't understand how to move on and what to do. For the first few weeks, my husband, our little child, and I lived in the basement, and I didn't think about the future, work, only about survival. But many of our customers supported us; they placed orders and asked us not to ship them, which helped us pay our team and continue our work somehow. (If you are reading this, I am infinitely grateful to you.) After a few weeks, we resumed work and started shipping orders to customers who had placed them. We simply worked without planning anything ahead and enjoyed the fact that we could work.
But eventually, we gathered ourselves and added many new products - clothing, waterproof table linens, and much more. We learned to live and develop in the conditions we have and will continue to do so. And our history continues, and I hope to write to her very soon about peace and victory.
