Christmas cards Bombus-style

Bombus’ creativity always blows us away – and this year she sent us a massive Christmas card with a Christmas tree cut from a map of the Antarctic. Extremely cool. See the rest of her creativity here.

Posted by jokite on 20 December 2010

Squishy success!

notonthehighstreet.com is all about supporting small creative businesses. We love it when our partners get recognition in the press so we were particularly delighted to see Squishy in a full page article in the Daily Mirror. Lucy Norris, founder of Squishy, has created a successful home-run business as a solution to having three young children who “wanted to play and make lots of mess and not eat broccoli or go to bed early”. Her story is truly inspirational.

Unable to go out to work due to her austistic son Tom’s needs, Lucy discovered (with the help of a play therapist) that Tom greatly enjoyed playing with homemade dough. Lucy realised that the colourful and aromatic dough she was constantly making might be a great source of joy for other children. And so it has been! Squishy has proven a hit and Lucy’s looking forward to celebrating a successful and very well-deserved Merry Christmas with her family.

Feeling inspired? If you are or know someone who runs a creative exciting small business please do get in touch to sell with us! We love welcoming new fantastic businesses into our community.

Posted by emmawood on 17 December 2010

East London Design Show success

We sponsored East London Design Show earlier this month, and it was a brilliant event. For those of you who went along, we are sure you enjoyed it! There was an amazing demonstration of talent on show, which we were pleased to recognise in our giving of two awards – one for non-sellers, of which the winner was Vic Lee (pictured with me) for his Londonerea prints, drawn and printed by hand. Watch out for him joining our site soon!

We also gave a prize to an existing seller on our site, which went to Takae Mizutani for their refreshing modern designs which have such charm, pleasing all ages.

Our co-branded cotton bags also went down a treat at the VIP evening, as everyone busied around doing their Christmas shopping. Our showcases in the entrance hall provided more gorgeous inspiration, and the crafthouse cafe gave everyone the opportunity to get stuck in. In fact Rebecca, our customer service manager, was today wearing the crafthouse brooch that she made at the show! All in all, a great event that we were really pleased to be a part of.

Posted by jokite on 14 December 2010

a new shoe obsession...

The only problem with working for notonthehighstreet.com is constantly being surrounded by beautiful, unusual things that we want to buy. Our lovely production coordinator Nicola is totally in love with her most recent purchase, a pair of ‘rock’ leather lace up shoes by Esska, one of our newest partners. The inky-blue shoes are part of Esska’s beautiful collection which is influenced by urban life and designed with both beauty and comfort in mind. We also really like the ‘Tiga’ booties and the ‘Hit’ leather lace-ups. We’d better form an orderly queue…

Posted by jenniferbaldwin on 10 December 2010

our first ad campaign!

Well, not quite but it’s a biggie so it feels like the first! Today we launched a special campaign to reach men this Christmas. The idea is that we can help men find touching gifts that women will really love. We get men gifting success, women get gorgeous gifts! We have created an Instant Hero button on our site, with four collections of gift ideas – big gifts, jewellery, personalised gifts and those essential little extras.

To promote the campaign, we have created a beautiful set of witty adverts which are going out in City AM, Shortlist and The Independent over the next couple of weeks. Watch out for them – hopefully they will make you laugh as much as we did! And here’s to you, receiving what you’ve always wanted for Christmas…

Posted by jokite on 07 December 2010

caught on camera!

We caught Emma and Jennifer from our PR and marketing teams doing some last minute preparations for our display at the East London Design Show. They wouldn’t let a little thing like snow get in their way, that’s dedication!

Posted by jokite on 03 December 2010

Sophie judges the talent at Cockpit Arts

This festive season, we teamed up with Cockpit Arts to celebrate some of their finest creative talent. Cockpit Arts is a social enterprise and the UK’s only creative business incubator for designer-makers. They have 165 residents, and are focused on nurturing and supporting these talented designers and artisans who have a craft basis to their work. This year, we sponsored the Cockpit Christmas tree, where all the Cockpit studio holders made a unique decoration for a Christmas tree, which was displayed at both their Open Studio events. Sophie was there to judge the decorations on Friday, and chose two winners who each won £250 and either a free notonthehighstreet.com membership or a slot in our Spring catalogue. After much deliberation the prizes went to Annette Bugansky in Holborn for her ‘Porcelain Jingle Bell’ and Ruth Martin in Deptford for her ‘Maid-a-Milking’ (both pictured above). Cockpit Arts is such a fantastic scheme for supporting small creative businesses, a cause we are very passionate about. We were thrilled to be a part of this brilliant project.

Posted by jenniferbaldwin on 01 December 2010