We truly are a family business. Carolyn is the boss, Charles is the chocolate maker/chocolatier and Tom is our environmental specialist but we all muck in to do whatever jobs need to be done.
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Our design philosophy
As you will know if you have read our story, the three fundamentals underlying our business are ethics, sustainability and taste. (Please read our social and sustainability statements to learn more about our approach to these areas). You will also know that we are a luxury chocolate business, but what does “luxury” mean? To our mind this is a term that has become devalued of late and conflated with branding and marketing, while for us, luxury is the result of craftsmanship and service.
Craftsmanship is key to the magical taste of fine chocolate. It involves sourcing the finest cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar to make our chocolate, grinding them for just the right amount of time (usually 36-48 hours) to produce the optimal blend of flavours (good dark chocolate has 200-300 flavours) while ensuring smoothness and then tempering the chocolate to produce its characteristic brittle texture and shine.
Quality and creativity are the key components of our fillings, so we make all our own fillings, starting from high quality ingredients. Indeed, sourcing ingredients is so important to us that we grow our own passion fruit and kumquat, dry grapes to produce our own raisins and make our own liqueurs. We feel that choice is a key component of luxury and like to offer our customers a wide choice of flavours, many of which we believe are unique to us. However, just being different, is easy. Making something wonderful, not just weird, requires creativity and craftsmanship and we are very proud of our range of Asian-inspired flavours (which include Mou Tai, sesame & Yunnan ham, mango & lime, lychee & sake, chun pei 陳皮 and cardamom & pistachio) and our “dessert in a bite” range (Black Forest, Belle Helene, Bella Giulia, Raspberry cheesecake and Strawberry Balsamic).
We believe a luxury business should take a customer-centric approach so our chocolates are largely made to order and we keep little or no stock. We grind our chocolate in small batches so that the chocolate is fresh and has lost none of its complexity of flavour and our fillings can be designed for optimal taste rather than optimal shelf life. We do not use artificial preservatives or additives. To ensure our products reach our customers in the best possible condition we deliver our products personally.
Of course visual aesthetics are also important so we make moulded chocolates rather than enrobed chocolates favoured by many chocolatiers in Hong Kong.
Our paper packaging is designed to convey a sense of nature and understated luxury while being sustainable. Our natural lacquer gift boxes are so beautiful that we believe are customers will want to keep and re-use them and we deliberately do not include our branding on the box to encourage re-use. However, should a customer not want to keep the box it can be returned to us in exchange for a credit on future purchases.
