Isabelle Maxwell: Life on the farm during lockdown

June 13, 2020

My plan for this summer had been to finish my second-year university exams before coming home and working as a tour guide at Alnwick Castle.

However, as we all know, this has been far from a normal summer. Instead of sitting my exams at university, they were taken from home.  And, at the same time as revising, there were plenty of hungry calves needing to be fed daily.

This summer was going to be something very different to the one I had planned.

And it was going to be something very different to the summer my family’s business, Doddington Dairy, had planned.

Many people who couldn’t get to shops to buy their cheese and gifts turned to the internet for their cheese fix. What’s not to love about a few clicks and cheese arriving on your doorstep?

While we are excited about the cheese that we produce here from our own cows’ milk at Doddington, we did feel that the way that we presented them online and in our hampers needed a bit of a revamp, with most of the imagery having been taken before our rebrand.

So that’s where I came in. Having always been fairly arty at school, as well as having very little else to do, I was brought in to look at the current online offering and what could be improved.

Initially starting with Father’s Day, which needed something fairly quickly, we asked ourselves (and our Dads) the question ‘what do Dads like to receive for Father’s Day?’

While laughing off my Dad’s reply of socks initially, the idea soon developed into a Father’s Day hamper with all the treats that Dad might like: socks, cheese and chocolate. I then came up with the idea of putting them all into a postable package.

In this, our brand new Postbox Hamper, we put socks from local company Capricorn and chocolate from North Chocolates as well as a piece of our cheese.

Now this hamper has been launched we are hoping to develop more hampers in the near future, so watch this space!

Isabelle Maxwell