Purple Sage Scotland

Lavender & Rosemary | Hand Serum Collection

Hands work hard. They're in water, in soil, in cold air, doing things that most skincare products weren't designed for. A good hand serum should understand that and get on with the job without making a fuss.

Sage Cottage Hand Serum is built on a base of sweet almond oil, shea butter, avocado oil, rosehip oil and macadamia seed oil, a considered blend that absorbs well and leaves hands feeling genuinely soft rather than merely coated. Calendula and chamomile extracts work quietly underneath, and vitamin E supports the skin through daily use.
Lavender and rosemary essential oils give this serum its character. Familiar, herbaceous, clean, a scent that belongs in a kitchen or a garden studio as naturally as anywhere else.

Made in small batches at Sage Cottage. For hands that deserve something properly good.

Comment SERUM or head here to check out the hand serums: https://purplesage.uk/collections/botanical-skincare

Happy Monday from Sage Cottage

"A little piece of the garden. wrapped around your daily ritual"

What are your plans for the week?

At what point does exporting stop being an opportunity and start becoming a barrier to growth for a micro-business?

It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

Purple Sage is a small Scottish manufacturer based in the Scottish Borders. Like many small businesses, Europe should represent an enormous potential market for us. But there’s a big difference between what is technically possible and what is commercially practical when you’re a micro-business.

For a larger company, additional administration, compliance, customs requirements and associated costs can potentially be absorbed across hundreds or thousands of orders.

When you’re sending relatively small orders, the calculation can look very different. At Purple Sage, we currently don’t ship to the EU. That isn’t because there isn’t a market for what we make. It’s because, as a micro-business, I have to consider whether the additional requirements, time and costs involved make those sales commercially worthwhile.

And I suspect we’re far from alone. So I’d genuinely like to hear from other small and micro-business owners: Are you currently trading with customers in the EU? If you stopped, what made you stop? If you’ve continued, how have you made it work? And perhaps most importantly, what would need to change to make European trade genuinely accessible for more micro-businesses?

I’d be particularly interested to hear from manufacturers, makers and rural businesses across Scotland and the wider UK.

There’s a lot of discussion about increasing exports and encouraging small businesses to grow. I think it’s equally important to understand what that looks like from the perspective of the businesses actually trying to do it.

BEHIND THE GARDEN GATE: This week we are back with the outdoor classroom build and look how far we have got!

Cover on, staging build, soil in place, stones gradually coming in for the path and seed already sown!

What started as an idea is slowly becoming a space where we can learn through nature, get our hands in the soil and discover all the things a garden has to teach us.

There’s still plenty to do and it certainly isn’t finished yet, but that’s part of the fun.
So come behind the garden gate with us and watch it take shape, one project at a time.

This is only the beginning.

ONE WEEK TO GO: Are you booked in yet?

Christmas might still feel a little way off, but now is the perfect time to get ahead with some handmade festive magic at Purple Sage.

OCTOBER we have TWO different workshops taking place:

Make Your Own Festive Gift Boxes
Spend a relaxed few hours creating and packaging FOUR beautiful botanical gift boxes, each ready to gift. Although, of course, we won’t judge if one makes its way under your own tree!

Festive Soap Making Workshop
Learn the traditional craft of cold-process soap making. You’ll make a full batch using our recipe, then choose your own fragrance, colour and festive botanical decorations. You’ll take home around 15 bars of handmade soap

Just two weeks to go, before we start our workshops!
Spaces are limited, so if you’ve been thinking about joining us, now is the time to book.