Women We Watch: Lucy Elliott of Creightons Chocolaterie

Have you heard? We've teamed up with Mother/Daughter partnership, Andrea Huntington and Lucy Elliott of Creighton's Chocolaterie to create a chocolate bar that's designed, handcrafted and wrapped by an all-girl team in the UK. We sat down with Lucy, to find out more about the design process, what makes her tick and her favourite piece of Tatty Devine... spoiler alert: it's a classic!

HOW EASY IS IT TO DEVELOP A PARTICULAR FLAVOUR, E.G. PINK GIN?

The ideas are the easy part - it gets difficult trying to source all the components. Finding the right ingredients to work in a bar takes a lot of research and it gets harder to find exciting new things the longer you’ve been doing it! New flavours are sampled and resampled lots of times to make sure they taste exactly how we want. I have a huge cardboard box of rejected and archived flavoured bars which I think shows how few initial ideas actually turn into final products.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START A CHOCOLATERIE?

I am a graphic designer firstly, but I am also a massive foodie with a very sweet tooth. There is something so satisfying about holding a beautifully wrapped chocolate bar in your hand and being excited by how it’s going to look and taste underneath the wrapper. I wanted everyone to experience that so, in absence of getting employed by someone else, I decided to make that my job and create the chocolate I wanted to buy. There are obviously very stressful elements of running a business that I don’t always enjoy (like VAT returns), but I get excited about going to ‘work’ every day to do the things I love.

FROM PODCASTS TO PLAYLISTS, WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO TEMPER TO?

We have three separate rooms at the factory, each with their own soundtrack:

Production have Absolute 80's on (Bros, anyone?!) Wrapping are working their way through podcasts: favourites have included My Dad Wrote A Porno, Teacher’s Pet and Serial... and Design team have an extensive collection of Spotify playlists, many of them unchanged since 2009 featuring everything from Luther Vandross to Sonic Youth.

BEST WAY TO ENJOY PINK GIN?

In the bath, door locked, not sharing.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVOURITE PIECE OF TATTY DEVINE?

I have been wearing Tatty since 2007 when I used to visit the Soho store on my lunch break. My first piece was the Aarrghhhh Necklace which I still wear and receive lots of compliments on! I also have a Name Necklace with my daughter's nickname on which she insists I wear all the time.

WHAT'S NEXT FOR CREIGHTON'S?

I’m currently working on this year’s International Women's Day charity bar which I love doing because I can be as creative as I like with it and it’s a great feeling to be able to donate a portion of the sales to charity. We also have a new ‘Happiness’ collection which is a different packaging direction, plus I’ve had the pens and pencils out for Christmas already… exciting stuff!