Corby eleven-year-old's lockdown sweetie business sells-out in hours

A Corby girl who decided to set up a Facebook sweet-selling business managed to sell her entire stock on the first evening after a phenomenal response from local people.

Ruby Aldred, 11, decided to start her own business using her Christmas money as an investment.

The Kingswood Secondary Academy pupil designed her own marketing materials, picked out an bought the sweets and boxes she would use to fill them and bought them online before filling them herself.

On Wednesday (December 6) evening with the help of her dad Dean she launched her Facebook page Oh So Sweet Treats Company and had hundreds of followers within two hours.

Dean said: "She just wanted to do something to make people happy as everyone is so sad at the moment. It was really about making money.

"I told her to have a think and we would support her to get it off the ground.

"We sat and designed a logo and she came up with the colour scheme and chose the fonts herself and even went through picking the different sweets to make sure they'd look right.

"I helped her to work out all the costs because it's so difficult for kids to learn the value of money these days. They don't have part-time jobs and everything is done online so I thought it would be a great lesson."

Within hours all of Ruby's 70 treat boxes had sold and she has now decided to expand her business to incorporate other types of treats.

Dean said: "She was out delivering them all day around Corby. We were definitely not prepared for the overwhelming response this got.

"We've even got a waiting list for when we get more stock in.

"This was so much fun and such a good idea as it did make people happy."

You can visit Ruby's Facebook page here.