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 cafe.

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.

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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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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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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!

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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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.

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.

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!

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.

A mum who built a busi­ness up in 18 months has made it through to the finals of a national entre­pren­eur com­pet­i­tion cel­eb­rat­ing women in business.

The Mumpren­eur Awards recog­nise busi­ness­wo­men through­out the UK who juggle a com­pany with fam­ily life, and 39-year old Han­nah MacLeod of Ket­ter­ing, has been singled out in the 2010 awards.

She has been short­l­is­ted for the Best Online Busi­ness award for her inter­net art busi­ness, with the award going to the final­ist who has the most deserving busi­ness and most inspir­a­tional website.

Ms MacLeod, who runs Coulson Macleod with her part­ner Mark Coulson, is delighted to be in with a chance.

She said: “I was very pleased to find out I had made it through to the final. I feel proud the com­pany has grown so much since it was estab­lished 18 months ago and delighted to be recog­nised by these awards.”

The busy mum launched the busi­ness with no ini­tial invest­ment and has watched it grow – the company’s goods are now stocked in shops around the UK and Nor­way, is a favour­ite of Saat­chi and Saat­chi, and has been fea­tured in numer­ous magazines includ­ing Elle Dec­or­a­tion UK, Easy Liv­ing and County & Town House.

Because she has been nom­in­ated for an award, she is also in with a chance of win­ning the title of Inspir­a­tional Busi­ness Mum 2010, which will be judged with the rest of the awards at the Mumpren­eur Con­fer­ence on Septem­ber 18 in Warwickshire.

She added: “It is import­ant for mums to know that they can do it – they should be con­fid­ent in their abil­it­ies. Being a mum makes you a multi-tasker – and you can put a load of wash­ing on, send an email and talk on the phone at the same time.”

Found out yesterday that I’m a finalist for a Mumpreneur Award. Out of 302 entrants from around the UK, I’m down to the final six in the category Best Online Business.

So what do you think, is Coulson Macleod in with a chance of winning?

The award ceremony is on 18th September so we’ll let you know.

Limited edition canvas-mounted art print by Coulson Macleod

And the second is ‘The Rolling Stones’…

Limited edition canvas-mounted art print by Coulson Macleod

Little confession time. Our two new prints have actually replaced two. ‘The Pixies’ and ‘The Velvet Underground’. Why? Erm… well… *whisper* they were not that popular.

Could have lied and said they had sold out. But that’s lying and we don’t lie. And of course the whole reason for our blog is to record the ups and downs of Coulson Macleod.

There is no point keeping them if they don’t sell. They are a remnant of the first days of Coulson Macleod, when Coulson used to design things just for himself. He loves The Pixies. And he loves The Velvet Underground. But clearly not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

And to quote The Beatles, it really is a ‘long and winding road’.

Coulson Macleod is a teeny weeny company.

There’s Mark, he’s the Coulson half. And there’s me, Hannah, the Macleod half.

The business is built on love and driven by passion. This is true. This is not some made-up marketing spiel.

Mark and I met, fell in love, moved in together and then got bored of staring at blank walls. We knew what we liked. But couldn’t find it to buy. Or if we did, we couldn’t afford it.

Then we said, “I bet there are other people out there just like us,” (or words to that effect).

Coulson Macleod is our baby. We love it and nurture it. We wake in the night to think about it. We proudly tell others about it. We glow with pride when it does well. It is ours. And we’re on a wonderful journey.

Perhaps Mark and I are building big castles way on high. Just the two of us. You and I.

Limited edition vintage-style art print by Coulson Macleod

We’ve been debating this for some time now here at Coulson Macleod HQ. Basically we don’t want to put our prices up. But if we want to continue growing, then we have to.

For any regular readers of this blog, you’ll have been following our progress as we grow and learn, the way you do when you launch a new business.

In September Coulson Macleod will be 18 months old. It’s been a fantastic 18 months. When we started the business we had no idea just what a global brand Coulson Macleod would become. Of course we hoped that people would like our art, and that some would become customers.

As the business has slowly grown we’ve made little tweaks here and there. And occasionally we make some whopping changes. Over the course of 18 months, we’ve had three completely new websites, can anyone remember the first version? We’ve created then deleted entire collections. And we’ve talked endlessly about where we want to go in the future. Sometimes to each other, sometimes to anyone who’ll listen.

The outcome is always the same. That in order to sell through stockists, and online marketplaces, and to go to trade fairs, and to create new and exciting collections, (and then there’s something called VAT, which I don’t understand and Coulson gets fed up trying to explain!), our prices are just a little too low to make this a long time viable and profitable business.

Our plans don’t involve charging Damien Hirst prices so we can retire to a villa in Antibes (although that would be nice). When we set out we wanted to create affordable art that we loved. This will remain the same. But you’ll just need a few more pennies (oh OK then, you’ll need a few more pounds).

So if you fancy owning a wonderful and unique piece of art at their current brilliant prices, then I’d suggest buying your Coulson Macleod before 1st September.