Not For Squares

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.

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.

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.

Yes I know it’s a Bill Wither’s song, but there really is just the two of us. And we can make it if we try (I’ll ignore the castles in the sky bit).

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

Coulson Macleod is fea­tured in this month’s issue of Easy Liv­ing Magazine.

Our art­work ‘Love Makes The Ride Worth­while’ is on page 11 on the Editor’s let­ter page. Susie For­bes says, “Finally — this Coulson Macleod panel (£149) with its sweet and poignant mes­sage takes us right back to feel­ing the love — and let’s face it, there’s noth­ing quite like it!”

So thank you very much Susie For­bes, Editor of Easy Liv­ing. You have great taste!

Coulson Macleod can be seen in this month’s issue of Red (not a fea­ture, unfor­tu­nately, but we’ve got a lovely big advert.)

Now we don’t do a great deal of advert­ising, because advert­ising costs lots of money. We’d like to though. We appear monthly in Elle Dec­or­a­tion and Livin­getc. And if you fol­low this blog, you’ll know that we did advert­ise in the Janu­ary issue of Elle.

Our adverts always attract lovely new cus­tom­ers, which is obvi­ously the point. But there is also a part of us that simply loves open­ing a magazine and see­ing ourselves in print!

Since launch­ing Coulson Macleod a little over a year ago (we star­ted the busi­ness in March 2009) we’ve updated our web­site twice. Actu­ally updat­ing is incor­rect, we’ve com­pletely redesigned the web­site twice.

And now we’ve just launched our third version.

Each time we strip it back fur­ther for an even more uncluttered look. We love sim­pli­city. And we totally love our new ver­sion, which was designed by us.

Would love to hear your comments.

As you know, we had our Coulson Macleod art­work pho­to­graphed pro­fes­sion­ally last Tues­day. We hired a pretty little chapel and a com­mer­cial pho­to­grapher. We had piles of props, some of which are ours, some we bor­rowed, and some we bought just for the occa­sion. And here are a couple of the shots taken…

We’ve got 174 shots to work through. As you can see from the bot­tom photo, some of the shots need crop­ping (we obvi­ously don’t want to see wall sock­ets in the final image). But we love the over­all feel. We were lucky with the light that day too, which flooded through the chapel win­dows and meant that most of the shots were taken without need­ing arti­fi­cial light.

Can’t wait to put them on our new-look web­site. In fact we can’t wait to show-off our new website.

So if you’re from a magazine and fancy fea­tur­ing Coulson Macleod art, then we have plenty of high-res images to send you.