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Everyone remembers the excitement of cracking open the doors of your advent calendar as a kid each morning as you eagerly count down the days to Christmas. Over the years, advent calendars have even become premium with the likes of big named beauty brands and gin calendars growing in popularity every year.
One local family noticed the demand for new variations of premium and more personable advent calendars and have taken it one step further by making them asuitable to gift all year round. Birthdays, anniversaries and times where you just want to show some love to the people in your life, Manchester based business SevenYays specialise in countdown calendars no matter what the occasion.
As someone who loves celebrating my friends and family’s birth-weeks, I thought this was a great idea and had to test out the calendar for myself.
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Coming a long way from traditional chocolate calendars, what really intrigued me about the SevenYays calendar is that you could customise your own box with a choice of over 400 gifts – or Yays – to choose from. Your personalised calendar can include sweet treats, candles, your favourite tipple, and jewellery to name just a small sample of gifts.
I had no idea what was going to be in the box I received, but one thing’s for sure – it smelled incredible. Without even opening the packaging, I could smell the sweet citrusy scent of clementines, which definitely is one of my favourite smells.
The box – which you can build from just £21 – was presented beautifully and surprisingly large, which really added to my intrigue and excitement. The idea behind the box, creators Andrew and Charlotte Staal say, is that it gives you something to look forward to each day, with the seventh door typically being the big gift.
This is what came inside my calendar:
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Clementine Mimosa scented Candle
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Chocolate bar
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Avo and mint lip balm
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Candy Kittens Sour Watermelon jellies
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A bracelet ‘sending you a hug’
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A cross stitch kit
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Two relaxing space eye-masks
Undoubtedly my favourite had to be the candle which is handmade in Derbyshire and burns for about 15 hours. Each gift was really thoughtful – knowing you get to wake up to a present each day is never a bad thing!
While hand selecting each gift to create your personalised box is, in my opinion, the best thing about these calendars, for those who are uncertain about what to select, you can pick from a selection of carefully curated pre-made Yays boxes from categories such as Seven Days of Spa, Seven Days of Birthday Fun, Seven Days of Kindness, Seven Days of Blokey Bliss and so much more.
Speaking to mum and dad Charlotte and Andrew from Worsley, they said their eldest daughter Anna, who is now 19, asked “Why don’t we have advent calendars for birthdays?”, when working on a project for her GCSEs.
Running with the brilliant idea, the family worked together to make their teenage daughter’s concept come to life.
“We knew from our own observations that advent calendars over the past five to 10 years had become increasingly prevalent and premium. People these days would think nothing of having a birthday week or month, and there was nothing really that reflected that in the market, so essentially we asked Anna if we could borrow her idea and turn it into something,” Andrew said.
The family business has grown immensely from when it first began in 2020, and following the success of their birthday boxes, they noticed the demand for countdown calendars people can give and receive all year round.
“We noticed a spike during Covid time where people wanted to gift loved ones boxes to countdown the end of their isolation period but then after that, people carried on sending them to people for all sorts of reasons and different occasions, big and small.
“We have a small unit in the shopping centre in Walkden where we employ three people to help us pack and dispatch the boxes and we’re already looking to expand, hopefully next year, to a bigger premise,” Charlotte said.
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