The homemade velvet ribbon chain garland is one of the most popular home accessories this festive season
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hristmas is always the busiest time of year for Josie Rossington, 52, the owner of the Follie gift store on the edge of Lincoln town centre. Christmas cards and ornaments are ordinarily her best sellers. But this year it’s her stock of velvet ribbon that has been flying off the shelves – metres and metres at a time.
“People have been buying 20, 30, 40 metres. It’s a lot of ribbon,” says Rossington, who estimates she has sold a total of six miles of it since October.
At first, Rossington thought the spike in sales was due to a blip in the algorithm. “I’ve had about 1,500 searches on Google. And I’m tiny, I’m literally nothing in the whole internet of people. So that is massive for me,” she says. But soon she realised that the demand had been prompted by a growing online trend.
