Not For Squares

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…

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!

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.

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’.

IMPORTANT NEWS: As of 1^st Septem­ber 2010 Coulson Macleod will be a little bit more expens­ive to buy. Sorry.

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 1^st September.

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.