People get together to cover a van in flowers.
Sometimes Facebook throws something lovely your way, out from the blue and I'd like to share it with you in this blog.
Hippy Motors was 'tagged' in a post for someone's fundraising event so, being nosey, I took a look. A lady called Cathy Hill, or a friend of Cathy's started a fundraiser to help decorate her van and this is the description saying why she is asking for help...
“Cathy's new van has no flowers on it. People like to see flowers on Cathy's van and are, currently feeling disappointed. Her (previous) flowery van brought joy and happiness, wherever it went. However, the flowers cost money and Cathy doesn't have any, right now. By donating money for small, medium, large or huge flowers, you could help her 'flower' her van and continue to bring colour, magic, joy and positivity into the world.”
That, in a few sentences, sums up why we do what we do. When people see a motor with bright and colourful flowers on it it lifts everyone up including the driver. Driving around spreading smiles to all is just wonderful. Even teenagers, in our experience, react well; true some don't like it but they all stop, look and individuality and creativity is always appreciated. Drab, dull and repetition is easy in our day to day lives but, as Cathy says, flowers on the motor bring joy and happiness.
Those of you out there, our beautiful customers, know this already, driving around being noticed because your van looks like no other van, getting waved at by friends and strangers also makes you happier and lifts your own spirits. Driving brings its own stresses but driving around in a decorated van, making others smile, making yourself happier really does make a difference to the mood.
It was great to see Cathy's post, her request for help, it was even better to see others felt like her and were donating and, of course, we also wanted to help.
Being honest with you we don't have the money to donate either. Business is really tough right now, if we are still doing what we do in a year from now we'll be relieved. Brexit took away maybe 20% of our business overnight as selling to Europe was once really good for us, now that's all but gone. Then Covid came and that stopped camping, festivals, fun and took another chunk of business away. The local council approved a building to be built in front of our solar panels meaning it'll cut our renewable and cheap power off over winter. Recently, just as things started to crawl back to something like post Brexit levels of business, the UK took more irresponsible decisions involving the cost of living and, quiet rightly, a lot of people stopped spending money on decorating their motors. This current situation, lets face it, makes being miserable easy, so what better way to lift the mood than to drive around in a flowery, funk-upped motor. In fact maybe we should expand Cathy's fundraiser to be a nation campaign, let us all lift our national mood, lift ourselves out of these dark times imposed on us by miserable people, turn our back on the fools that make negative feelings and go bright, go bold, fun and funky. Maybe The Arts Council should fund at least one flowery motor in every community to lift spirits! Lets spread joy and smiles and don't let them drag us down.
For the reasons mentioned we don't have any spare money ourselves, our business after 20 years of trading is struggling but we offered to help Cathy in our own way. We contacted her and told her the fundraiser meant a lot to us and we'll offer her extra flowers for free with her orders from donated money.
Sure enough Cathy did well on her campaign, had many good people donate money to her quest, and when her order came in to us we added extras in the package for her. Today, to write this blog, I went onto her fundraiser page and we are absolutely delighted here to see her once naked van is looking glorious and she got many who donated money to put them on.
Reading the comments on the post is just heart-warming. This comment also sums up why we do what we do, “Sorry to have missed the flower sticking. The van looks great and brought a big smile to my face as I walked past this morning” and this one “She looks marvellous! I saw her earlier and she made me smile! So many beautiful flowers”. In these hard times people gave to Cathy to flower up her van. How lovely.
We are really struggling here at Hippy Motors, we are not sure if we can ride out this current downturn in business, so seeing this on Facebook, reading the comments, seeing people getting together to convert a dull van into one that spreads joy is what we need right now to encourage us to keep on going. We really hope we can ride out this downturn in business, we really want to carry on because our business, our ethos, we think is a good one.
Thank you for all of you out there that support us. Thank you for brightening up strangers lives by just driving around adding to the good vibe. Thank you for being the bright, fun and creative ones that make a positive difference. Thank you Cathy for giving us a boost here, we love you.
PS- Checkout Cathy's art on her Facebook page, it's so beautiful. She is clearly a joy.
