Not For Squares

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saat­chi & Saat­chi World­wide wrote this lovely piece about us on his blog KR Con­nect,

“A few weeks ago, I dis­covered Coulson Macleod, an art busi­ness mak­ing waves from Northamp­ton­shire. It’s the cre­ation of Mark Coulson and Han­nah Macleod, a couple who share a strik­ing design aes­thetic, rad­ic­ally pos­it­ive ambi­tion, and, most import­antly, love.

I’ve bought sev­eral of their pieces, which are all hand-finished in lim­ited edi­tions. The works in the Love Col­lec­tion are favor­ites of mine – bold typo­graphic designs fea­tur­ing declar­a­tions of feel­ing and fam­ous romantic lines from clas­sic movies. Other col­lec­tions cel­eb­rate the pop cul­ture of dec­ades past, the icons of music his­tory and the spirit of Cool Brit­an­nia – all top­ics close to the heart.

After I sent the team a note of encour­age­ment, Han­nah Macleod shared the company’s “simple little love story” with me. It’s also a story of smart, down-to-earth entre­pren­eur­ship. After fall­ing in love, the couple began work­ing together. Want­ing new art for their home, but not able to afford high-end prices, they decided to design their own rather than deign to buy mass-produced prints, and thus Coulson Macleod was born.

Start­ing small in March 2009, Han­nah and Mark didn’t have big dol­lars for pro­mo­tion, but built their own web­site and show­cased their designs online. The work spoke for itself, and with grow­ing sales they could soon begin advert­ising in top interi­ors magazines. Now, Coulson Macleod fields orders from all over the world, and tracks the buzz on their blog. Brides-to-be have con­tac­ted them to ask if they can read out the quote from the “What Is Love?” piece at their wed­ding – a spe­cial request as this was writ­ten by Mark.

As Han­nah described it to me, the com­pany is “built on love and driven by pas­sion”. The world needs more entre­pren­eurs like this. Here’s to spread­ing the Love.”

Yes, that’s right, Coulson Macleod is one today!

The idea to sell art popped into our heads just over a year ago. And by the 4^th March 2009 Coulson Macleod became an offi­cial business.

We launched our web­site on the 20^th, and cel­eb­rated our first sale of a lim­ited edi­tion print two weeks later. Now, in the nor­mal world of retail, two weeks would be rather a long time to wait for a cus­tomer. But at this stage you couldn’t have found us by search­ing on the inter­net. And we hadn’t advert­ised. We were ecstatic!

It’s been a bril­liant year.

We’ve shipped prints to far away lands. Aus­tralia. New Zea­l­and. Canada. And to prac­tic­ally every state in Amer­ica. Cus­tom­ers some­times buy more than one print at a time. Cus­tom­ers are com­ing back to buy more. For birth­day gifts, wed­ding gifts, or another print for their own walls.

So we’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to thank all our cus­tom­ers. And to every­one all around the world who has taken the time to write about us. Whether you’ve just pos­ted an image of our art­work with a link back to us, or writ­ten a gush­ing wordy art­icle, we still get totally excited at see­ing our name out there.

We’ll be drink­ing a toast to our next year, which we’ve already got heaps of plans and designs for.

Cheers!

We men­tioned awhile back that a friend of Coulson Macleod had been nom­in­ated in the 2010 Blog­gies.

We can proudly announce that 3limes has won! 3limes won in the Best Latin Amer­ican category.

Well done Sam­antha, you deserve it as your blog makes for a bril­liant read. Next year fin­gers crossed she’ll win the Best African Web­log as Sam­antha now lives in Uganda (she used to live in Trin­idad). If you have a spare five minutes do read her blog, a fas­cin­at­ing insight into liv­ing in the more exotic parts of the world.

I get very excited when I meet other cre­at­ive folk and par­tic­u­larly when they’re local to Coulson Macleod. If we lived in Lon­don we’d expect to meet like-minded design­ers all the time. But we’re not in Lon­don. So I have the pleas­ure of intro­du­cing a brand new busi­ness, Smiles Design, owned by Stephanie Miles, a freel­ance tex­tile designer. Stephanie makes the quir­ki­est neck­laces I’ve seen for awhile and I can see them being big news.

I’m abso­lutely lov­ing this bird­cage neck­lace (£20)…

I also love love love her cards (£5.95), which remind me of Rob Ryan…

Stephanie’s busi­ness is so new that she doesn’t even have a web­site yet, but if you’d like to place an order then you can con­tact her at smiles.uk7 @ mac​.com

Just had some really great close-up shots of our lim­ited edi­tion can­vas print ‘Amer­ican Noise’ — and we think they look fantastic.

Our can­vas prints are fin­ished by hand, by exper­i­enced local crafts­men.  We use a nat­ural (100% cot­ton), tex­tured can­vas, com­ple­men­ted by a chunky (45mm deep) Dutch spruce frame.

Let us know what you think.

As we approach our first birth­day, we thought it was about time to add a Testi­mo­ni­als page to the Coulson Macleod website.

We asked some of our more high pro­file and cre­at­ive cus­tom­ers for their com­ments. We’ve got five lovely com­ments so far, so do check out our web­site to read them.

Of course, if you’re a Coulson Macleod cus­tomer who has a busi­ness that you’d like us to link back to, then please let us know. We’ve only been able to ask our cus­tom­ers that sup­plied a busi­ness email address so we could identify them. But we’d love to hear from you too.

Coulson Macleod now offers a per­son­al­iz­a­tion service.

Coulson Macleod bespoke art. Per­fect wed­ding gift.

The bespoke piece has to based on these best-selling prints from our Love Collection:

Simply pick a sim­ilar num­ber of words and sen­tences that you want to incor­por­ate, and we do the rest, res­ult­ing in a one-off piece of bespoke art­work that’s totally per­sonal to you.

An ideal gift for someone get­ting mar­ried or a wed­ding anniversary.

Our bespoke prints cost £199.

Just found the most gor­geous place to stay (via Lake Jane) in Mar­rakech. Riad Dixneuf la ksour. My oh my it looks heav­enly. Mar­rakech is a place I fell in in love with many years ago. Intox­ic­at­ing. The smell. The heat. The sounds. The souk. The tagines. OK I think you get the picture!

Just stumbled across the works of Finnish artist Car­oline Slotte (via Lost) and instantly fell in love with her work. Car­oline reworks found objects, mainly second hand ceramics.

Whilst Googling Coulson Macleod I noticed a link to Single­track World, the web­site for the moun­tain bike magazine Singletrack.

I had to investigate.

What had happened is that someone on the Single­track World forum says, “I saw this and thought of you…” with a link back to our Love Makes The Ride Worth­while print.

Coulson Macleod lim­ited edi­tion typo­graphic art

All makes sense now.

Has any­one else found them­selves in unex­pec­ted places?