Merryn was launched in April 2016 to champion independent businesses, creators, artists, makers, retailers, charities and community groups from the UK and Ireland who follow their dreams, make peoples’ lives better and bring joy!
How did Merryn start?
In August 2009, my wife Michelle was in a car accident and suffered a brain injury. This left her with many issues, but one of them was that she couldn’t deal with crowds of people, so this caused us to stay indoors to enable her to recuperate.
In August 2015, Michelle was still too ill for us to go outside and enjoy time together as a couple so we couldn’t do things such as going to restaurants, visit new cities or enjoy being tourists in our own city of Liverpool. We had effectively been in what we all now call “lockdown” for 6 years by that point. Throughout this time, we had been living in Michelle’s mum’s spare room as we only had my income coming in, and so we couldn’t afford to live on our own.
Around this time, I was inspired by this picture I saw shared on Twitter:
Those are chocolate vegetables made by Choc on Choc and you can still buy them now.
After 6 years of lockdown, I was really starting to miss being a part of the world (my family were back in Leeds and I had no friends outside of work in Liverpool). I noticed other independent retailers sharing their products online and, inspired by Choc on Choc’s image, I thought how great it would be to create a way to promote them. This is how Merryn was born!
In 2012, I started a WordPress website to help to promote events taking place around the UK and Ireland called What’s On Where. I ran this website until Merryn began. I’m hoping to relaunch this website later in the year and run it alongside Merryn.
In June 2016 I started publishing Independent Music Monday interviews with unsigned artists and also Charity Tuesday interviews with charities, community groups and support groups. In July 2016 I added Writer Wednesday interviews with self-published authors.
Every year, I publish a Christmas gift guide featuring amazing products from small and independent businesses from around the UK and Ireland. The 2022 guide featured over 100 businesses and nearly 1,000 products. The guide usually goes live around the start of October and 2023’s guide went live on 1st October.
At the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, I started a new WordPress website called Remote Access Experiences as there were so many online events taking place that I found it hard to keep up, so I created the website so that I could showcase all of the quizzes, music gigs, cook alongs, workshops and comedy that were taking place at that time. Even though we’ve now come out of lockdown and in-person events are now possible again, lots of people found that events being online meant that they could take part, whereas they had been excluded in the past, for all manner of reasons. Due to this, I’m hoping to also relaunch this website in the future and run it alongside Merryn.
Even though I feature product links on the Merryn website, they are not affiliate links, meaning that I do not make any money from any subsequent sales that come from people clicking on links on the site. I do not charge anyone to be featured. Over the years I have been offered free gifts from people as a “thank you” for being featured, but I also don’t accept gifts or samples. Merryn exists solely to champion others, and is run as a hobby around my full-time day job in higher education, and caring for Michelle. In 2017, Michelle was well enough to go back into full-time work and she supports me with the website, which is why I write “we” and not just “I”. At the request of others, in 2022 I set up a Patreon account so that people can help to support the running of Merryn and you can find out more about that here.
Your life can change in an instant, but sometimes good things can come from bad events 🙂
Jenny x
Merryn 