Coulson & Macleod. We’re not the only couple who work well together. Are you a couple in busi­ness? Do tell us your story if you are.

Here’s some inspir­a­tional couples run­ning great com­pan­ies and a little insight into how they do it together…

Mr & Mrs Smith — foun­ded by Tamara Heber-Percy & James Lohan

One ques­tion posed to them dur­ing an inter­view was, “What chal­lenges do you face work­ing together as hus­band and wife?”

James, “The key for me is hav­ing dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent roles in the office.”

Tamara, “At the moment we’re both try­ing to bal­ance the growth of our busi­ness with look­ing after our two young chil­dren. I do think that a suc­cess­ful work­ing rela­tion­ship between part­ners is reli­ant on hav­ing a stable and secure rela­tion­ship at home. We never let busi­ness prob­lems inter­fere with fam­ily time, but when there are excit­ing pro­spects on the hori­zon it’s great to be able to talk to each other, as it is the live­li­hood of our whole family.”

Toast — foun­ded by Jes­sica & Jamie Seaton

Jes­sica, “I look at the struc­ture of the col­lec­tion, the shoot, the cata­logue, and Jamie shapes busi­ness decisions with me. There’s a lot of cros­sover. My strength is the over­view, the way things fit together, and Jamie’s is detail and rig­or­ous perfection.”

Agent Pro­vocateur — foun­ded by Ser­ena Rees & Joe Corré (now divorced)

Joe, “We get requests from all over the world. We’ve had depart­ment stores approach­ing us for years, say­ing, ‘Can you do some­thing in our store?’ But whether we can recre­ate in a depart­ment store the atmo­sphere of our shops, and that intim­ate and per­sonal exper­i­ence of our cus­tom­ers, is a prob­lem. Because if we can’t do that, then we won’t do it at all. We don’t have any great mis­sion to expand into every out­let we can.”

Firm­dale Hotels — foun­ded by Kit & Tim Kemp

Kit, “I think we would be unem­ploy­able any­where else, as we’re both perfectionists.”

Their roles in the part­ner­ship are well defined. Tim finds the loc­a­tions (Soho Hotel is on the site of a former NCP car park) and does the sums. Kit designs the interi­ors and has an eclectic eye for detail that ensures no two rooms are the same. The secret of their suc­cess is know­ing how to spend.

Kit, “We have never skimped, even dur­ing an eco­nomic downturn.”

Baileys Home and Garden — foun­ded by Sally & Mark Bailey

Sally, “We’ve always been into antiques and recyc­ling, and the busi­ness blends the two together. When we star­ted, we ploughed a lone fur­row, but mix­ing old and new and recyc­ling has become very fash­ion­able and we’ve seen the interest in what we do grow enorm­ously over the last few years.”

Mark, “I prefer things to be worn and lived-in and Sally goes along with me. I love things that are well made and have some integ­rity, hon­esty and heritage.”

Their own home is a con­ver­ted barn next to their shop, work­shop, and café.

the Rug Com­pany — Suz­anne & Christopher Sharp

“What do you enjoy most about being an entrepreneur?”

Chris, “As I con­sider myself unem­ploy­able, I have little choice! I love the vari­ety of what we do and, right or wrong, I like mak­ing my own decisions. Trav­el­ling, meet­ing inter­est­ing people and work­ing in a craft I feel pas­sion­ately about, I don’t think it gets much better.”

“Any­thing that comes out of a pas­sion just works.” Now that sounds very Coulson Macleod.

To keep up-to-date with all our news (and have access to exclus­ive sales and giveaways) do join us on Face­book.

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Coulson Macleod was on a con­fer­ence call the other morn­ing — a mar­ket­ing sem­inar by phone. The topic was ten tips to being a suc­cess­ful per­son. As they went through the list we Tweeted them. Then real­ised they would make a good blog post for you too, because our blog is about a busi­ness jour­ney. So here they are…

1. Be optim­istic
2. Have an aim, pur­pose, or vision
3. Will­ing­ness to work
4. Dis­cip­line
5. Have an integ­rated mind
6. Read
7. Take cal­cu­lated risks
8. Real­ise the power of expectation
9. Don’t try to be great at everything
10. Be well rounded

Now some of these are obvi­ous. Oth­ers, are not.

To have an integ­rated mind basic­ally means to use your con­scious and sub­con­scious thoughts. If you make a habit of doing some­thing it goes into your sub­con­scious. You do it auto­mat­ic­ally. But your sub­con­scious mind can hinder you, for instance if you work at your kit­chen table and you have a pile of dirty dishes by the sink, your sub­con­scious mind may be think­ing about that. So work in a focused man­ner and environment.

Real­ise the power of expect­a­tion means to expect the best. When we star­ted out Coulson Macleod we said that we wanted to have New York, Milan, Sydney etc under our brand name. Like you see with the big designer names. Well we have Milan. Sydney may not be far behind.

Being well roun­ded means you enjoy a bal­anced life. There’s not much point in being a bil­lion­aire if you have no friends and bad health.

There. Now you know how to be suc­cess­ful. Makes it sound so easy!

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Whilst Googling Coulson Macleod yes­ter­day I came across a coun­cil doc­u­ment entitled Ket­ter­ing Town Centre Regeneration.

And lo and behold they have included us.

Under sec­tion 3 titled Bet­ter Town Centres, sub­head­ing New Shops, (yes, you can tell this is an Exec­ut­ive Com­mit­tee doc­u­ment so do bear with me) it says,

3.1 Ket­ter­ing res­id­ent Han­nah Macleod star­ted the design brand Coulson Macleod in 2009 without any external fin­an­cing.  Han­nah is one of three final­ists for Small Busi­ness of the Year in the East Mid­lands ‘Women of Worth’ Awards.  Along with Han­nah, sev­eral other entre­pren­eurs have rolled up their sleeves and are cre­at­ing busi­nesses in our town centre.  Within the last two months we have seen the open­ing of:…

It then goes on to list a few shops that have opened up, such as a flor­ist and a boutique.

So thanks Ket­ter­ing Bor­ough Coun­cil for recog­nising the con­tri­bu­tion we’re making.

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I didn’t win the Mumpren­eur 2010 award for Best Online Busi­ness.

But I was in great company.

Amongst the judges were Rachel Elnaugh, ex dragon on Dragon’s Den and founder of Red Let­ter Days. Jo Cameron from series 2 of BBC’s The Appren­tice. And multi-award win­ning Lisa Warner founder of Fink Cards. Not bad hey?

The Best Online Busi­ness Award went to Adina Bel­loli for Little Lun­alu.

Not only a fant­astic busi­ness selling the coolest urban clothes to the under fives, but Adina cre­ated The Lun­alu Found­a­tion, so when you buy any Little Lun­alu product, 5% of the sales goes towards mak­ing the lives of under­priv­ileged chil­dren around the world better.

As much as I’d love to have won, the award went to the right person.

Other win­ning entre­pren­eurs included…

• Anna Louise Simpson won Best Start-Up for Mama Tea. Her herbal tea is now sold in Waitrose.
• Carry Somers won Inspir­a­tional Busi­ness Mum for Pachacuti. Carry set up co-operatives in Ecuador to make her Panama hats and is pas­sion­ate about improv­ing the lives of people in the Andean region. Her hats are sold in 300 retail­ers around the world.
• Claire O’Connor won Best Inter­act­ive Busi­ness for Baby Bal­let, a multi-award win­ning song and dance academy with branches across the UK.
• Jac­queline Wag­gett won Most Unique Product for Paca­pod, an innov­at­ive and multi-award win­ning baby chan­ging bag.
• Solvej Biddle was run­ner up for Most Unique Product for TrayKit, the all-in-one kid’s carry-on back­pack and play-tray. You may have seen Solvej on this series of Dragon’s Den. She won the sup­port of all five dragons, but settled for a joint deal between Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden. Brit­ish Air­ways is now TrayKit’s chosen air­line partner.

So I didn’t win this time. But there is always next year. And other awards. So watch this space!

Ja, vi elsker dette landet? It’s Nor­we­gian. It trans­lates as, Yes, we love this coun­try. This is the title of their national anthem. And this is how Coulson Macleod feels about Norway.

Why do we love Norway?

Actu­ally the ques­tion should be, why does Nor­way love Coulson Macleod?

We’ve just taken an order from our fourth stock­ist there. Coulson and I are think­ing a trip to Nor­way is in order. We can visit our gorgeous-looking stock­ists in Oslo, Ber­gen, Gjøvik, and Nit­te­dal (pictured)…

and this gor­geous look­ing country…

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As a final­ist in this year’s Mumpren­eur Awards I know that I’m up against five other busi­ness women. I’m not yet sure who all of them are, but I do know about Vic­toria Dixon who runs Enhance Me.

Vic­toria cre­ates per­son­al­ized enchanted por­traits from your own pho­tos. And they really are quite charming.

In par­tic­u­lar I love her Fam­ily Tree…

You could have real fun pos­ing your fam­ily. I rather like the idea of hav­ing Great Granny swinging in the upper­most branches.

Today is a good day. Why? I hear you cry.

Well folks, we have beaten our sales record. We have sold more prints in August than in any other month in the entire his­tory of Coulson Macleod. And we’ve been up and run­ning for almost eight­een months.

We have a white­board on our office wall. Every time we make a sale we wipe off the old num­ber and write up the new one. I say we, but actu­ally I usu­ally do this, partly because my hand­writ­ing is neater, but mainly because it gives me a huge amount of pleas­ure. Every month we write down how many we’ve sold, whether they’ve been sold via Not On The High Street or through shops or if they’re bespoke and how many came via one of our adverts in Elle Dec­or­a­tion or Livin­getc.

We love our white­board. We quite often catch each other star­ing at it fondly. Because every month the fig­ures go up. And that is super exciting.

And this month, only half way through August I might point out, we’ve notched up the biggest num­ber since our records began. To let you into a secret, we only star­ted record­ing this on the board since Novem­ber, which was when we star­ted selling in ser­i­ous num­bers and the idea of a white­board sprang into our heads.

So ladies and gen­tle­men, tonight we may clink our glasses and say a little toast to our little boom­ing busi­ness that we love so much.

Thought we’d share with you one of the more unfor­tu­nate sides of becom­ing a suc­cess­ful business.

We have a copycat.

On the one hand this is flat­ter­ing. They obvi­ously think we’re a good model to base your busi­ness on. Which we are. On the other hand, as you can ima­gine, it’s annoying.

When they first launched, about a year after us, they even had the auda­city of pro­du­cing a canvas-mounted art­work exactly the same as ours. Until we threatened legal action. Now they have some­thing pretty sim­ilar, just not as good.

Coulson Macleod’s ‘No Place Like Home’ canvas-mounted art print

But they don’t just copy designs. Far more than that. They fol­low everything we do, then rep­lic­ate it. Weird hey?

This copycat com­pany has also stolen designs from other com­pan­ies, then sells them as ‘unique’. At least three other com­pan­ies have had their ideas reproduced.

Some­times when we’ve writ­ten some­thing on our blog, or our Face­book page, or tweet on Twit­ter, I see almost the same words the next day from this com­pany. It’s like hear­ing an echo.

No doubt they’ll be read­ing this. But as they have no shame I don’t for one second think this will stop them.

Oh the joys of being in business!

A bit of a strange post today. It’s all about packaging.

Coulson Macleod HQ has been try­ing to buy shred­ded newspaper.

Why?

Well firstly by its very nature it’s recycled. Which is good. And it’s in keep­ing with what we do. Typo­graphic pack­aging. Perfect.

But can I find a com­pany that does it? No.

We recently ordered some plants from a nurs­ery in Corn­wall. Inside the box was shred­ded news­pa­per. And we thought how much bet­ter that would be than using bubble wrap to keep our art safe on its journey.

So I Googled. And Googled. But could not find any­one that sells it. I con­tac­ted our local coun­cil. They didn’t provide a solu­tion. So I con­tac­ted the nurs­ery and they buy it as animal bed­ding. But the com­pany they buy from only sup­plies Corn­wall. Then I found a com­pany in Scot­land. But their min­imum order was 20 x 20kg bales. Yikes! We’re not farm­ers and we don’t have a spare barn.

So if any­one read­ing this knows of a com­pany, prefer­ably within the Mid­lands, that sells clean shred­ded news­pa­per, please let us know.