On Monday 4 February we travelled to Birmingham Spring Fair International to select products for the Christmas 2013 range for our online shop. The Spring Fair is the biggest trade fair in the UK and takes place in all the halls of the National Exhibition Centre (NEC). The fair attracted over 63,500 buyers, had over 3,000 exhibitors and 300,000 new products being displayed in 2012. With so much to see we made sure to start walking as soon as we arrived.

Through research, including customer surveys, we’d learnt a lot about our customers and their buying preferences. In particular things that are important to our customers are value for money, being able to support British businesses and the environmental impact of products. With this in mind, we started our two day trek through the labyrinth of the NEC. 

Over the course of the two days we met some impressive new suppliers and saw some exciting new products. We viewed catalogues and collections, individual items and entire ranges and saw everything from Christmas to spring gardening. Over the coming months we’ll be whittling down our extensive list of products to a select few from high quality suppliers to create our range for Christmas 2013.

Thank you to all of our supporters for your feedback and comments on Facebook, Twitter and via our online surveys. Your feedback really does make a difference to how we select our products. We welcome any comments (good or bad!) as we are committed to continuing to improve our range to ensure we can make as much money as possible to help beat blood cancer and improve the lives of patients throughout the UK.