You get through the first week thinking everything is perfectly manageable, then suddenly your diary is a thicket of birthdays. Your sister. Your best friend. Two people at work. Someone's child whose age you can never remember. Your brother-in-law, whom you have known for eleven years and for whom you have somehow never once had a good present idea. By the final week of September, buying birthday presents starts to feel less like a lovely expression of affection and more like a recurring direct debit.
It turns out this isn't simply the result of having unusually fertile friends. September really is birthday season. Office for National Statistics data shows that mid-to-late September and early October contain many of the most common birthdays in England and Wales, with previous ONS analysis finding eight of the ten most common birth dates clustered towards the end of September. In other words, if your WhatsApp currently seems to consist largely of cake emojis and messages beginning "Happy birthday you gorgeous human", there is statistical justification for it.
From start to finish, almost every part of our business has been affected by cost increases.
Our chocolate comes from Belgium, but the cost of importing it has been heavily affected by Brexit. There’s also been a chocolate shortage following a pause in production during Covid, which means prices have risen up to 15%.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has led to a shortage of cow feed and fertiliser, which has which has dramatically increased the cost of farming cattle and producing butter. Therefore our butter prices have increased by almost 30%.
Like many businesses and homes across the UK, we’ve struggled with the increase in gas and electricity prices. There’s been little government support for businesses, which has meant we’ve had to absorb energy cost increases of up to 200%.
Our packaging costs have risen up to 25% due to a shortage of raw materials and an international freight increase of 500%.
Labour costs have increased due to a shortage of workers, primarily due to Brexit and staff leaving London during the pandemic.
Courier costs have risen due to both a shortage of workers and increased fuel prices. Most wholesale fuel is charged in dollars, which the pound is currently weak against.
We probably don't need to draw you a diagram.
Count backwards roughly nine months from late September and you arrive somewhere around Christmas and New Year, that peculiar stretch of the calendar when nobody knows what day it is, breakfast can legitimately contain cheese and port, and going to bed at 2pm because you've eaten too much is considered perfectly reasonable behaviour. People aren't commuting, nobody is answering emails and apparently some of us find other ways to fill the time.
There is actual evidence behind this pleasingly obvious theory. The Office for National Statistics has previously found an increase in conceptions around Christmas, which helps explain why the maternity wards get rather busy nine months later. There are other possible factors too, including parents thinking about where a child's birthday will fall in relation to the school year, so we can't attribute the entire September baby boom to festive goodwill and the second bottle of red. But we can probably attribute some of it.
Of course, by the time September comes around, nobody is thinking about conception statistics. They're thinking, Christ, another birthday.
Buying a present for somebody you adore can be genuinely enjoyable. You spot something in June that is so perfectly them that you buy it immediately, hide it somewhere incredibly clever and then spend three months trying to remember where the incredibly clever place was. That is thoughtful gifting in its purest form.
Unfortunately, most birthday shopping doesn't happen like that. Most of it begins when your phone casually informs you that Sarah's birthday is tomorrow and you experience the particular stab of guilt reserved for realising that you love somebody very much but have apparently done absolutely nothing about it.
Then comes the frantic mental inventory. Does she like candles? Everyone likes candles, surely. Although you gave her one last year. Flowers? Lovely, but perhaps a bit predictable. Wine? What if she's stopped drinking? A mug with something hilarious written on it? Absolutely not. She has cupboards.
This is why food is such a magnificent present. It doesn't require storage, doesn't need to match the sofa and doesn't quietly become somebody else's charity-shop problem eighteen months later. It arrives, causes pleasure and disappears. There is something rather luxurious about being given something delicious that you would probably hesitate to buy for yourself, particularly if it turns up unexpectedly at your front door on an otherwise completely ordinary Tuesday.
This becomes increasingly difficult as we get older because, broadly speaking, most adults already own the things they need. We have enough mugs. We have towels. We have kitchen equipment bought during brief periods when we believed we were going to become the sort of person who makes their own pasta. What we don't necessarily have is a box of excellent chocolates, a ridiculous piece of cheese, very good coffee, a beautiful cake or twelve obscenely fudgy brownie bites waiting for us when we get home.
Consumable gifts are particularly good for people you know well enough to want to spoil but not well enough to know whether they'd appreciate a hand-thrown ceramic vase. They're also rather useful for the impossible people who answer "nothing" when asked what they'd like for their birthday, which is both spectacularly unhelpful and, usually, completely true.
Experiences work beautifully too, especially when you really know the person. Dinner somewhere brilliant, theatre tickets, a massage, a wine tasting or a class can all feel far more generous than another object in a gift bag. The only danger is accidentally giving someone an obligation dressed as a present. Nobody wants to spend their birthday pretending to be delighted about the introductory pottery workshop they'll now have to attend at 8.30 on a Saturday morning.
We weren't going to get all the way through this without mentioning them.
There is something inherently celebratory about receiving a box of brownies. They're unnecessary in exactly the right way. Nobody needs a salted caramel brownie delivered to their house, which is precisely why it's lovely when somebody sends you one.
They're also extremely useful when you're staring down the barrel of six September birthdays because you can send them directly to the person you're buying for. No wrapping paper. No trip to the Post Office. No buying a beautiful birthday card and then carrying it around in your handbag for three weeks because you forgot to buy a stamp.
And because our brownies come in little bites rather than enormous slabs, there's theoretically the possibility of sharing them. We say theoretically because we have met people.
The real secret to surviving September birthdays is not having better present ideas. It's doing something about them while you're actually thinking about them.
If you suddenly remember that your dad's birthday is in three weeks, buy his present now. Not tomorrow. Not after you've checked whether your sister has already bought him something similar. Now, while the thought is physically inside your head. If you're ordering from somewhere that lets you choose a future dispatch date, you can arrange the whole thing in advance and then return to your life with the quiet satisfaction of a person who has unexpectedly become very good at birthdays.
We let you choose a future dispatch date at Bad Brownie for exactly this reason. You can look through your diary, deal with the birthdays coming up over the next few weeks and then forget all about them until somebody messages to say, "THANK YOU FOR THE BROWNIES ❤️", at which point you get to behave as though you are simply the sort of effortlessly thoughtful person who always has these things under control.
Nobody needs to know that you ordered them three weeks ago while sitting on the sofa in your pyjamas.
And if you've made it to the end of September before discovering that September is apparently Britain's birthday convention, don't worry. October is just around the corner.
You might want to check the calendar now.
Need Inspiration?
The easiest way to catch up on all the latest Bad Brownie gossip. Read our brownie blog now!
