Not For Squares

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.

Coulson Macleod’s PR for the Mumpren­eur Awards 2010 con­tin­ues. Yes­ter­day our local paper wrote this art­icle on me…

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 18^th Septem­ber so we’ll let you know.

As well as design­ing very cool typo­graphic art col­lec­tions, we, that’s Couslon Macleod, can also cre­ate per­son­al­ized art just for you.

Just to show you some examples of our bespoke art…

This one, using our ‘Winter Trees’ as a base, was cre­ated for one of our customers…

… who then wrote us this amaz­ing testimonial,

“I’d been inter­ested in Coulson Macleod’s work after see­ing it in the press, and hav­ing dis­covered via their web­site that they also do bespoke work, I sug­ges­ted an altern­at­ive word­ing. We dis­cussed a treat­ment, I was sent an image for pre approval and five days later a fant­astic and unique piece is now hanging in our home. I could not be more delighted with the fin­ished piece of work whilst the ser­vice offered was noth­ing short of brilliant.”

Isn’t that nice?

A close-up of the bespoke art based on our Winter Trees collection.

Our bespoke per­son­al­iz­a­tion ser­vice can also be based on our rough-sawn solid oak-framed ‘Love’ prints, like this one…

All you have to do is pick a sim­ilar num­ber of words and sen­tences that you want to incor­por­ate, and we do the rest.

So if you’d love to own a one-off piece of art that has been cre­ated just for you, or you need to find a truly unique gift, then just click on Coulson Macleod. Simple.

An overly pat­ri­otic title per­haps, but this Shakespeare quote (I removed ‘the realm’ part as that was tak­ing it too far) is rather apt to describe this little corner of Eng­land. Coulson and I went explor­ing. We wish all our towns looked like this…

You can’t beat an old red let­ter box.

A second hand bookshop.

Oh! to own a shop like this.

Here’s the church.

Two cur­rant buns in a baker’s shop.

What can we buy in the greengrocer’s shop?

A secret garden.

This is the house that Jack built.

Lov­ing the thatch.

Don’t know what their piz­zas are like, but I’d like to find out.

You just want to enter, don’t you?

How lovely is this high street?

An ori­ginal street sign.

Ye olde signpost.

An oasis in the centre of town.

For the eagle-eyed among you, you will have noticed that we have two new prints in our ‘Noise’ col­lec­tion. The first is ‘The Beatles’…

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’.

Last night we received an email from the organ­isers of the Dirty Dan­cing Fest­ival. Yep! There is a Dirty Dan­cing Festival.

Why did they con­tact Coulson Macleod?  Well, they want us to donate our ‘Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner’ print for their silent auc­tion, which is being held after the ‘Time of Your Life’ Gala. How won­der­fully cheesy is that?

And the best bit about the Fest­ival? It’s being held at the lake where they filmed this…

The sched­ule of events made me smile. You can take part in a water­melon car­ry­ing con­test, a cast look-a-like con­test, and there’s even a lake lift com­pet­i­tion (I’d be inclined to give this a go!)

Little fact for you: the film was set in the sum­mer, yet the lake lift was filmed in Octo­ber (there’s no close-up shots of their faces as appar­ently their lips were blue!) Since the leaves were already turn­ing, they had to paint the leaves in the back­ground and if you look closely you can see where they missed a few in one spot.

Whilst at the Fest­ival you can have salsa, shag, and mambo les­sons and then watch the A-Lure dan­cers per­form the moves correctly.

So for any­one inter­ested, the Fest­ival is being held 17^th — 18^th Septem­ber at Lake Lure in North Car­o­lina. And if the pro­spect of spend­ing your week­end sur­roun­ded by fel­low enthu­si­asts recre­at­ing Baby and Johnny moments is not a big enough pull, the loc­a­tion itself is gor­geous. In fact National Geo­graphic declared Lake Lure as one of the ten most beau­ti­ful man-made lakes in the world.

We haven’t decided yet to donate our print. What do you think?