Not For Squares

Since we launched Coulson Macleod 18 months ago we’ve made lots of cre­at­ive friends. One of these is artist/designer Joanne Holbrook.

Joanne, who used to work as a graphic designer for pack­aging design­ers Jones Knowles Ritchie and design agency Pub­li­cis, launched her art busi­ness in 2004.

When her eld­est son Stan­ley was born six years ago, she cre­ated this gor­geous print for his nurs­ery wall, mak­ing a col­lage of his name using some old print­ers blocks she’d picked up from a Lon­don market…

Then, when Albert arrived three years later, she cre­ated this equally lovely one for him…

Glad to have made some­thing spe­cial for her boys; Joanne put the blocks away. But when friends vis­ited, they kept ask­ing where she’d bought her art­work. Then nagged her to do the same for their children.

Tak­ing the ori­ginal let­ter­press effect as inspir­a­tion, Joanne now digit­ally cre­ates unique designs.

Visit Joanne’s store on Not On The High Street for her full range.

Yes, that’s right folks. Four. An unlucky num­ber if you’re Chinese. But not if you love Coulson Macleod. Launched 1^st Septem­ber, our four new collections…

‘Wilde Grey’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Wilde Blue’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Wilde Red’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art on reclaimed wood.

‘Nap­kin Not Ser­vi­ette’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Lunch Not Din­ner’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Pud­ding Not Dessert’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made typo­graphic art.

‘Hel­vetica’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘Futura’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘Times’. Coulson Macleod’s typo­graphic art on Vic­torian roof timbers.

‘John Len­non’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

‘Bob Dylan’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

‘Keith Richards’. Coulson Macleod’s hand­made solid oak framed art.

Launched today, the Coulson Macleod Gift Pack.

We’ve designed it so it doesn’t look like a last minute pur­chase. Or a ‘I haven’t got a clue what to buy. Oh a voucher will do’.

A Coulson Macleod Gift Pack is more than just a gift voucher. What you’re in fact buy­ing is a little work of art. A Coulson Macleod hand­made work of art. Simple, dis­tressed, typo­graphic… just smal­ler than usual.

We send our Gift Packs in a simple, brown, but utterly gor­geous Coulson Macleod-branded gift box. Made from recycled paper. Of course.

And inside is a unique Coulson Macleod artwork.

• Unique as it’s hand­made from reclaimed Vic­torian roof timbers.
• Unique as it’s white-washed by hand.
• Unique as it’s prin­ted by hand.

Of course, each of these stages brings its own slight variations.

• Each piece of wood has its own knots and cracks.
• Each paint stroke car­ries a dif­fer­ent amount of paint.
• Each hand-inked print is laid on to a dif­fer­ent sur­face tex­ture and a dif­fer­ent amount of pres­sure applied.

Res­ult­ing in a one-off piece of art. Which is what makes own­ing a Coulson Macleod so special.

Then of course we add your Gift Voucher. You can add your own per­sonal message.

Then your spe­cial someone can use their Gift Voucher as pay­ment, or part-payment, for any of the art­work on our website.

Well, that’s your Christ­mas presents sor­ted then!

Hand­made. Hand painted. Reclaimed wood. Dis­tressed typography.

So very Coulson Macleod. Unique. By design.

Hand­made. Hand painted. Reclaimed wood. Dis­tressed typography.

So very Coulson Macleod. Unique. By design.

Hand­made. Hand painted. Reclaimed wood. Dis­tressed typography.

So very Coulson Macleod. Unique. By design.

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…

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.

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!