There was a great sup­ple­ment in The Daily Tele­graph — a guide to inter­na­tional trade. And see­ing that Coulson Macleod is an inter­na­tional trader (25 coun­tries and count­ing), we read it with rel­ish. We loved this art­icle in particular…

…ten items you wouldn’t believe that we (the Brit­ish) could export.

1. Sand to the Arabs  - Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Mak­toum prefers Cheshire’s sand to that of Dubai for his race horses.
2. Canoes to the Eski­mos — glass fibre canoes. The Arc­tic is short on wood. Plus glass fibre is more durable.
3. Cheese to France — the French can’t get enough of our ched­dar, stilton, and wensleydale.
4. Tea to China — we send tea worth £600,000 a year. The Chinese like the upmar­ket image of such com­pan­ies as Twin­ings. How­ever, China sends us tea worth £412m.
5. Naans to India — Indi­ans they like the fact that they are packaged.
6. Cof­fee Makers to Italy
7. Vodka to East­ern Europe
8. Curry to Asia — in the form of Patak sauces.
9. Wine to Germany
10. Pizza to Italy

And the Brits import bag­pipes from Pakistan, whisky from Japan, and coal from Russia.

It really is a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

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

Not On The High Street (NOTHS) — the award-winning (and pos­sibly) largest online mar­ket­place for the UK’s best inde­pend­ent small busi­nesses — is launch­ing it’s first awards. The Make Awards 2011.

The Make Awards cel­eb­rate these busi­nesses – their cre­ativ­ity, their pas­sion for design, and the impec­cable cus­tomer ser­vice they offer.

And Coulson Macleod sell on NOTHS.

And we’re pretty con­fid­ent that we are cre­at­ive. We most def­in­itely have a pas­sion for design. And we are very proud to offer impec­cable cus­tomer ser­vice. If you agree, we’d be delighted if you’d vote for Coulson Macleod.

Vot­ing will go live in May, but in the mean­time you can nom­in­ate Coulson Macleod via NOTHS’ Face­book page. You can read about the Cus­tomer Votes, which are broken down to three awards

1. Gift of the Year
2. Hero Product of the Year
3. Best Cus­tomer Service

Thank you.

Another day another short­l­ist. Yippee!

Coulson Macleod has been nom­in­ated for a High Growth Award in this year’s Busi­ness Mum Awards.

It’s the 3^rd annual Busi­ness Mum Awards, which is pro­moted by the UK’s lead­ing Mumpren­eur sup­port net­work, MumsClub.

Win­ners will be announced 8^th March, which is Inter­na­tional Women’s Day.

Related art­icles:

• Small Busi­ness Of The Year
• Inter­na­tional Trader Of The Year

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.

Related art­icles:

• Small Busi­ness Of The Year
• Inter­na­tional Trader Of The Year: Part 2

Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog ‘Not For Squares’ will know that Coulson Macleod was recently a final­ist at the Northamp­ton­shire Busi­ness Excel­lence Awards 2010.

We were down to the final four busi­nesses in the cat­egory — Inter­na­tional Trader of the Year.

Among the com­pan­ies nom­in­ated for awards was The Pickled Vil­lage. Bril­liant name. Bril­liant products.

We were delighted to see they’d been nom­in­ated as our cup­boards are stocked with their jars of yummy pre­serves and chutneys.

The Pickled Vil­lage was foun­ded in 2008 by Cam­ille Ortega McLean. Cam­ille runs the vil­lage shop, stocked with fab­ulous hand-picked fine foods includ­ing her own range of pre­serves, chut­neys, dress­ings and mar­in­ades. How lucky are the res­id­ents of Bulwick?

The recipes for The Pickled Vil­lage derive from the all over the world, but all have a local fla­vour, whether from loc­ally sourced nat­ural ingredi­ents or from adding tra­di­tional Eng­lish twist to an exotic recipe.

And who could res­ist start­ing the day with a Cuban Break­fast, a very zingy lime marmalade using all the ingredi­ents of a Mojito cock­tail. How decadent.

Related art­icles:

• Inter­na­tional Trader Of The Year: Part 2
• Inter­na­tional Trader Of The Year
• A Little Bit Of PR

Hoo­ray! Coulson Macleod and our glob­ally loved typo­graphic art are award final­ists once again.

We’ve made it to the final four entrants at this years Northamp­ton­shire Busi­ness Excel­lence Awards for Inter­na­tional Trader of the Year sponsored by HSBC.

Inter­na­tional Trader. Us!

Well we have shipped our typo­graphic prints to Aus­tralia, Canada, Fin­land, France, Ger­many, Greece, India, Ire­land, Italy, Neth­er­lands, New Zea­l­and, Nor­way, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emir­ates, and right across the USA.

The win­ners will be announced at a gala din­ner on 18^th November.

Related art­icles:

• Mumpren­eur Awards 2010
• A Little Bit Of PR
• Mum In Line For National Award
• Mums In Business

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…

Related art­icles: Tusen Takk Trondheim

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!