It's A Hello From Us...

Hello and how do you do?! It’s so nice of you pop by and join us for our very first blogpost. We flung open the doors of Ashbridge and Brown the best part of eight years ago because we wanted to fill a gap on our high street that we thought it was missing: An independent gift shop selling a range of thoughtfully curated, beautiful gifts all hand-sourced by us and that you wont find on the corner of every single high street . Special things!

We’ve got a pretty simple approach to what we stock: We like to be different for all of the right reasons! We only deal with nice people creating beautiful products as fairly and sustainably as they can and the kinds of things WE would buy and you might buy as a present, want to keep yourself and maybe might pass on when you outgrow it. We've always sworn by the motto: 'Buy once and buy well' and so we only buy things we hope will last and you'll use and love for a long, long time. We also believe in treasuring life's simple moments, the everyday joys and the little 'wins' and we want what we sell to reflect that and we want to encourage our customers to do the same.

We’ve always been a mostly bricks and mortar sort of a shop – the old fashioned kind that will always greet you on arrival with a great big smile and send you off with your gorgeous goodies bundled up in a brown paper bag after a jolly great chin-wag about what you've had for breakfast, what the weather's doing and why you're buying what you're buying! We've gathered so many loyal customers in our eight years here - many who have become great friends - and in a city as small as Carlisle, we still meet new ones each day and are proud to have customers who travel many miles just to pop in and see us.

If you’ve been lucky to visit us in Carlisle you’ll know we love to get creative with our displays, never take ourselves too seriously and we like to have fun using vintage furniture, and up-cycled ‘things’ to display our products in ways that we hope will always make you smile and brighten up your day.

These past few months we’ve had to get even more creative and have built an online empire we’re jolly well proud of. We’ve hand-delivered (at a safe distance!) many a brown paper parcel locally and posted them all over the globe AND enjoyed figuring out how to sell through both Facebook and Instagram. We’ve pulled our social media ‘socks’ up so we can help stretch our little shop that bit further and continue to inspire you from the comfort of your own home and if that wasn’t enough here we are with a new and shiny blog to go along with it all too!

We hope to use this corner of the website to keep you posted with what’s happening in store and with us and as another place to get creative! We also hope it might open up our pretty pink-doored shop to even more people and help us grow even more.

SO if you’re new here, or a regular visitor to the shop or even if you’ve ended up here by accident; pull up a comfy chair, grab a mug of something hot and a biscuit to dunk for extra measure and have a good goosey gander around. We’re SO pleased to have you and we can’t wait to share more!