Coulson Macleod is now on Sheer­Luxe, the lux­ury shop­ping directory.

Sheer­Luxe, who say they are the defin­it­ive guide to lux­ury online shop­ping (and we agree), fea­ture such estab­lished and cool new brands as Liberty, Space NK, Astley Clarke, and Browns. And Sheer­Luxe invited us to join. How hon­oured are we?

One of the fea­tures of Sheer­Luxe is that mem­bers can cre­ate a Lust List. Back in May, we saw that we’d been added to Laura Colonnese’s Lust List. Laura, who is the Brand Man­ager at Eng­lish lux­ury goods brand Thomas Lyte, had also added Louis Vuit­ton, Solange Azagury-Partridge, and Jimmy Choo onto her Lust List. Now that’s my kind of shop­ping spree.

Then in August Sheer­Luxe sent out one of their Luxe Mails to all their mem­bers. The email news­let­ter, called Home is Where the Heart is, was only about Coulson Macleod.

We’re abso­lutely delighted to be part of SheerLuxe.

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.

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.”

Thought I’d just tot up where in the world we’ve shipped our art to. So aside from the UK, Coulson Macleod prints now hang in homes in the fol­low­ing countries…

Aus­tralia, Canada, Fin­land, France, Ger­many, Greece, India, Ire­land, Italy, Neth­er­lands, New Zea­l­and, Nor­way, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emir­ates, and of course from the east to west coast of the USA.

How very, very cool!

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?

Just checked the Coulson Macleod web­site to see how it’s rank­ing. We use the very effi­cient Web­site Grader.

Coulson Macleod ranks 194,873 of the 2,082,799 web­sites that have been ranked so far.

A web­site grade of 91/100 for www​.coulson​macleod​.com means that of the mil­lions of web­sites that have pre­vi­ously been eval­u­ated, Web­site Grader has cal­cu­lated that our web­site scores higher than 91% of them in terms of its mar­ket­ing effectiveness.

I’ll give myself a little pat on the back!

Coulson Macleod is on Face­book.

Coulson Macleod’s Face­book page

For us, Face­book is an excel­lent way to col­lect and show­case all the com­ments that we find on the inter­net about Coulson Macleod. People can then click the links to access the blog or web­site if they want to read further.

And of course we can chat to our fans, which is some­thing we really love.  If you’re not already a Fan of Coulson Macleod on Face­book, we’d love to wel­come you.

From time to time I check how well the Coulson Macleod web­site is doing — stat­ist­ic­ally speaking.

Coulson Macleod now ranks 83,276 in Aus­tralia accord­ing to Alexa, the web­site inform­a­tion com­pany. Alexa bases a website’s pop­ular­ity on vis­it­ors and page views.

In the world, Coulson Macleod ranks 1,605,043.

Just had some very excit­ing news in…

A friend of Coulson Macleod has been nom­in­ated in the Tenth Annual Web­log Awards for her won­der­ful blog 3limes.

3limes has been nom­in­ated in the Best Latin Amer­ican Web­log cat­egory, des­pite the fact that our friend is now based in Uganda, but she did live in Trin­idad. I’m sure she’ll be nom­in­ated for Best African Blog next year.

Take a read, it’s totally absorbing.

Just been check­ing to see how Coulson Macleod is doing with its online pres­ence. And see­ing as this blog is called the Gen­esis of an Art Busi­ness I’d thought I’d share it with you. And I’m pretty pleased.

On Alexa we have a traffic rank of 270,415 in the UK.

And if you type in Coulson Macleod in Google, there are 129,000 res­ults. And this keeps on growing.

So big thank you to every­one who has ever writ­ten any­thing about Coulson Macleod any­where on the internet.