Brocante Subscriptions

All the Details I Forget to Share

Should you ever find yourself wondering who, in all the land, is the woman least likely to promote herself, I can assure you, with the tragic confidence of one who knows, that it is me.

Yes. Me.

Me, who can spill out the last thimbleful of emotion I’ve got hidden in my ribs and then insist you sit down with a cup of tea while we examine it under a lace-trimmed microscope. Me, who can write about shame, longing, grief, menopause, lavender drawers, failed dinners, complicated love, odd little obsessions and the entire theatre of being a woman without so much as blinking.

And yet ask me to say, with any real conviction, “Here now, look what I made for you,” and I practically have to be lowered into a cabbage-rose cave, wrapped in a patchwork quilt, and left there until the blush has drained from my cheeks and the small mortified part of me that has curled up and died has recovered enough to pull on a hoodie and mingle with the hoi polloi again.

It has always been so.

When I sold furniture in my gloriously happy little shop in my early twenties, I would sidle up to prospective purchasers of frankly divine reclaimed painted tables and mutter hello as though I had been caught doing something unspeakable behind the armoire. Then, should they begin, God forbid, to ask questions about the furniture I was genuinely proud of, I would stammer out my answers with a little sprinkle of attitude, because some daft, furious part of me didn’t understand that selling something people actually wanted to buy did not mean I was being asked to prostitute my entire soul on the altar of capitalism.

And so it went on.

I would head out to price up a decorative painting job in one of the many gorgeous houses in the area, only to find myself somehow negotiating my own fee down before anyone had even flinched. I would stand there, dying quietly in my boots, thinking that if push came to shove I would probably be perfectly fine with paying them for the sheer privilege of being allowed to breathe near their William Morris wallpaper.

Promotion has always been hard. Asking to be paid properly has been harder. Telling the world that the work I make has value has sometimes felt like standing naked in the greengrocer’s holding a sign that says PLEASE VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE.

Ridiculous, yes.

(Also true).

And despite knowing, with all the sensible parts of myself, that this is a psychological barrier, a rusty old gate in the middle of the garden of my own success, here I am, twenty-one years into BrocanteHome, still hovering beside it, wondering if I’m allowed to open the thing.

But lately, much to my own horror and delight, I have begun to suspect that I might be.

Allowed, I mean.

This week BrocanteHome appeared and has stayed on both the Bestselling and the Rising Home and Garden Substack lists. My payment processor informed me that I’m now in the top 1% of comparable subscription-based businesses for growth, low cancellations and refunds. And when I sat down and did the sums, I realised that around 70% of my subscribers eventually become lifetime members.

Which is quite something, isn’t it?

Especially given that I am essentially a woman with a candle, a laptop, several unresolved platform-based urges, and the ADHD devil whispering, “What if we moved everything somewhere else by Friday?”

But still, you stay.

You stay because you know that, despite my eccentric ways, I am not going anywhere. BrocanteHome is not a passing fancy. It is not a flimsy little internet whim in a peony-print frock. It is work I have been making, tending, fretting over and pouring myself into for more than two decades.

It is consistent. It is prolific. It is generous. It is sometimes chaotic in the manner of a woman trying to reorganise her entire life with a notebook, a migraine and an unwise amount of hope, but it is always made with love.

To know me is, I think, to love me.

(I cringed so violently writing that I have probably ruptured something emotional.)

But it is also true, in the way true things often are: embarrassing, tender, and wearing yesterday’s cardigan. Those who stay here tend to stay. Those who understand BrocanteHome don’t really need me to explain why it matters. They feel it. They recognise the language. They know that a home is never only a home, that a woman is never only tired, that a ritual is sometimes the tiny hinge between collapse and beginning again.

The trouble is, I have never been especially good at asking people to love me.

Or asking them to buy what I make.

Or saying, clearly and without immediately crawling under the nearest eiderdown, that this work is worth supporting.

So here I am.

Just a girl, standing in front of Substack, asking you to love her.

Or, more accurately, asking you to understand what is available here at BrocanteHome, what each subscription means, and why becoming a paid member makes such a profound difference to the future of this work.

So let me gather myself, pull on my big girl socks, and explain the difference between the subscriptions I offer here at BrocanteHome.

Substack Subscriptions…

First, there are the BrocanteHome Substack subscriptions, which work in the usual Substack way, only with considerably more tea-stained history behind them.

As a paid subscriber, you receive access to subscriber-only posts, occasional subscriber-only downloads, and the growing archive of BrocanteHome: twenty-one years of writing, rituals, domestic mischief, emotional excavation, seasonal loveliness, and all the other odd little treasures I am slowly but surely importing here, post by post.

Many of my posts are free when they first appear, because I want BrocanteHome to remain generous and welcoming. But after a month, those posts are folded into the archive, and the archive belongs to my subscribers.

Think of it as the great BrocanteHome attic.

Not a dusty, dreadful attic full of broken suitcases and one ominous rocking horse, but the kind of attic you dream about finding in an old house: trunks of letters, chipped china, old rituals, wild ideas, half-forgotten wisdom, and the occasional emotional ghost wearing a very good cardigan.

Right now, I am offering 50% off all BrocanteHome Substack subscriptions if you pop over to this page.

I’m doing this for two reasons.

First, because I want as many women as possible to be able to enjoy my work, especially now, when we are all tired, stretched, overstimulated, underheld, and in need of something that feels gentle but not flimsy.

And second, because subscriptions here are the heartbeat of BrocanteHome. They keep the lights on. They keep the archive safe. They keep me writing, making, gathering, tending, and showing up in this little corner of the internet we have somehow made into a home.

And then there is my Library Membership Program

This is the big one.

This is special.

When you join The Library, you are invited into the fuller BrocanteHome world, and inside you will find everything I have ever created, yours for the taking.

And I do mean everything.

All the printables from my Etsy store. All of them. My newest Sanctuary printables. My dedicated BrocanteHome GPT, Betty, who is essentially an in-house guide, muse, and occasional vintage agony aunt. All my seasonal books. A truly abundant series of in-depth courses, workbooks, resources and inspiration, including The Glorious Mess, The Whimsical Year, and so many other heart, home, body and soul companions.

There is also, but only if you want it, community. Quiet company. A place to gather. A place to begin again. A place to wander through BrocanteHome in your own way, at your own pace, following whatever little golden thread happens to be calling to you that day.

It is a pick-your-own-adventure BrocanteHome experience.

You might come in because you want to make your home feel more like sanctuary. You might stay because you find yourself knee-deep in seasonal rituals, journal prompts, life-tending workbooks, printable loveliness, and the peculiar relief of being among women who understand that “getting your life together” is rarely a straight line and often involves laundry, grief, hormones, soup, financial panic, a new notebook, and an unreasonable belief that a different candle might sort everything out.

The Library is for the woman who wants all of BrocanteHome.

Not just the posts.

The whole rambling, generous, domestic, soulful, slightly eccentric house.

It is $29 a month or $199 a year, and for that you receive access to the entire BrocanteHome world: the archive, the courses, the printables, the books, the community, Betty, the resources, the seasonal work, the deep dives, the little comforts, the big reckonings, and all the muchness I can possibly gather for you.

In short:

A Substack subscription gives you the writing, the archive, and the ongoing posts.

The Library gives you everything.

A truly extensive, pick your own adventure, BrocanteHome experience for just $29.00 a month or $199.00 a year…

---

So there we are. Me, attempting not to combust with embarrassment while telling you that this work matters, that it has taken me twenty-one years to build, and that your support keeps the whole lovely, unruly, candlelit circus alive.

Whether you choose a Substack subscription or step fully into The Library, please know this: you are not merely buying posts or printables or access to a dusty old archive of my domestic feelings. You are helping me keep making a place where women can come to remember themselves. A place for the tired, the tender, the messy, the midlife, the hopeful, the starting-again. A place where home is sanctuary, life is ritual, and we are allowed, at long last, to take ourselves seriously without losing our sense of humour entirely. Which would be dreadful, obviously.

Thank-you. To subscribers old and new, truly, thank-you.

---