Chocolate And Love, Happiness You Can Eat

This April, we at Lady Wimbledon, are celebrating Artisan April. Features of the International Women’s Day party goody bag, Chocolate and Love create tantalising Fairtrade and organic chocolate. We spoke to co-founder Birgitte Hovmand O’Connor to find out more about what makes Chocolate and Love the way it is.

Source: chocolateandlove.com

Who/What inspired you to start your own business?

My husband and I wanted to create a business together, something we were passionate about, something where we felt as though we could make a difference. We both love food and we wanted to create a product that we too would enjoy eating, and we found that cacao and chocolate is so fascinating. We were enthusiastic about the idea that we could inspire people to eat better chocolate (better ingredients, organic and Fairtrade, and less sugar). We wanted also to have the freedom to travel and work from where ever we wanted to work from and provide freedom to our team to work remotely and have more opportunities to have a flexible work life.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced?

Building a consumer brand is a long journey, where you have to be really patient in growing your customer base, as this is certainly not done overnight. I normally like to see progress and results quickly, so having to build a brand over years has been a real challenge.

Source: chocolateandlove.com

What do you enjoy most about running your own business?

We love that we can do this together, we love to create beautiful products that taste amazing and that do good at the same time, it really fills me with joy. Every time I hear how much people enjoy our chocolate, it makes me happy. We also thoroughly enjoy our many empathetic customers and partners that we work with. We work with a lot of family businesses that have great values. But above all, I have the privilege to work alongside my husband every day.

Source: Chocolateandlove.com

Which product/service have you enjoyed creating the most?

I particularly love creating our patterns. I make them with an artist from New York and we find out together each little item that we want to include into the pattern along with deciding on colours, then she hand paints each item and it is put together as a pattern that we use for the bars and the gift items, etc. Making beautiful marketing material is also such a joy and having close relations with our customers, meeting them at fairs and events is so rewarding.

Website: https://chocolateandlove.com