Thorneywork Studio at Spring Fair 2013

Following previous tweets and blog post, I thought you might like to see some images from Thorneywork Studio's stand at this year's Spring Fair.

Francesca Duffield & her Thorneywork Studio stand at Spring Fair 2013

A close up of the Thorneywork Studio stand

'Ophelia' lamp from Thorneywork Studio

Francesca is a graduate of our Interiors & Lifestyle Futures Ventures' programme. You can read more about her here

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies. Find out more at ILFutures

5 ways to create a brand

Axle Davids, of Distility Branding in Toronto, shares his thoughts about brand creation in an article from Canada's The Globe and Mail. 

"The classic misconception is that branding is just about a logo or a name.” To do it right, he advises, start with these questions:

"Who is your target audience? Before you say “everybody” – which many businesses do out of fear they might limit themselves – think hard about who your most important customer is. That’s your primary audience, Mr. Davids says. Then identify your secondary and tertiary audiences.

What’s the competition doing? How are they addressing your target audience? This is easier to determine if you’re in a mature market with one or two well-entrenched competitors.

What’s your brand position? What sets you apart in your market? If you can’t answer this, then you’re losing on a critical concept of branding: how to differentiate yourself.

What’s your brand promise? Determine what you’re passionate about, fuse that with the needs of your target audience and you get your brand promise – the benefit that you promise to deliver.

What’s your brand personality? In what style will you deliver your brand promise? Will you be dependable but surprisingly fun? Will you be the hero, with better-than-the-rest deals that don’t compromise on quality?"

For the full article and links top pieces on start-ups, entrepreneurship and blogging please see here

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies.  Find out more at ILFutures

8 signs you're in the right (or wrong) job

Have you a job that just pays the bills or are you doing something that you love? Amber Rae from the Bold Academy reckons this checklist (edits by me) will help you decide. It provoked some debate as you'll see if you check out the full article.

1 It doesn't feel like work 

You frequently stop and think to yourself, "Wait, am I seriously working right now?"

2 You are aligned with your core values

Your life's work is an extension of your beliefs and worldview.

3 You are willing to suffer

You'll be exposed to unexpected challenges and setbacks and you may endure hardship, rejection, and sacrifice. These roadblocks will motivate you

4 You experience frequent flow

At 1:13 p.m. you realize five hours have gone by since you looked at the clock last. Or, you look up and realize it is 12:21 a.m. and your instinct is to keep creating.

5 You make room for living

Though you feel captivated and enthralled by your work, you make room for healthy routines like fitness, connection, spontaneity, and play. These activities re-energize and enable you to live a holistically fulfilling life.

6 Commitment is an honor

 Commitment to your work feels like breathing. You cannot imagine spending your time dedicated to any other purpose.

7 The people who matter notice

"This is without question what you're meant to be doing!" are among the comments you may hear from the people closest to you when you're on the right path.

8 You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow

This is your life and you cannot imagine living it any other way.

Amber Rae's full article and links are on the Fast Company website.

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies.  Find out more at ILFutures

Spice up your (creative) life: five manifestos for starting a personal revolution

Very useful piece by Kirstin Butler gathering together manifestos on kick-starting your creativity and nudging “ideas out of your head and into the hands of the world.”

1. Right Brain Terrain: create to create – “to learn a little more about yourself”
2. The Cult of the Done Manifesto: “Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing”
3. Holstee:  “Do what you love and do it often.”
4. Work Is Not A Job:  “You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.”
5. Do The Work: “There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognise this.”

I’d highly recommend taking five minutes to check out Butler’s piece on the brilliant Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings site for the details. Five Manifestos For the Creative Life

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies.  Find out more at ILFutures

What do you know about graphic design?

Here’s one for the wish list –a terrific boxset of 500 land mark graphic designs.

Even if you don’t agree with all of the choices and I know how strongly opinionated the Interiors & Lifestyle community is about design, The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design is a wonderful idea.

Instead of fixing the images in place as a book format would dictate, Phaidon has cleverly boxed their selection as loose cards. That means you can skip the original chronological order and arrange them to suit your own themes and uses.

There are 3000 colour illustrations and 300 black and white illustrations, ranging from the Gutenberg Bible to “newspapers, magazines, posters, advertisements, typefaces, logos, corporate design, record covers and moving graphics from around the world.”

It isn’t cheap but then a reference source like this wouldn’t be. I can hear art and design walllahs trying to get this through on departmental expenses even now!

Sean O'Hagan writes about the collection here and you can go straight to Phaidon here and on You Tube

 Thanks to Ken for pointing this my way.

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies.  Find out more at ILFutures

D day: the four Ds of brand positioning

Interested in a short guide to branding? A book well worth tracking down is Paul Dickinson’s “It’s Not About Size: Bigger Brands for Smaller Businesses”, published by Virgin Books in 2001.

Here are the 4 Ds of effective brand positioning:

(1) Brand definition – telling the customer clearly what market the company is in.

(2) Clear differentiation – making sure the customer knows why the company’s offering is different and more beneficial to them.

(3) Deepening the brand – know as much as possible about the company’s customers and their goals and make sure the products and offerings are relevant to them.

(4) Defending the brand – small companies have to be flexible to compete with bigger brands. Review and evolve the brand over time.

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Adrian Burns is part of a team supporting  the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies. Find out more at ILFutures

What drives some high achievers?

Online college.org has a page summarising pieces of key advice that shaped 50 Famous Leaders. Here are 8 I’ve picked out.

1 Gen. David Petraeus: “Get out of your comfort zone.”

In the 1980s, a superior officer suggested Petraeus try something different intellectually, so he got a Ph.D. in international relations. The experience helped him become the top military officer in Afghanistan and director of the CIA.

2 C. Vivian Stringer: “Stand up for something or people will fall for anything.”

This women’s basketball Hall of Fame coach might never have had a career in sports if not for her father’s advice to fight for her place on a high school cheerleading squad, despite her skin color.

3 Tyra Banks: “Plan for the end at the beginning.”

She’s more than just a leading model; Banks also acts as CEO for her company, Bankable Enterprises. She learned from her mother that every project comes to an end and to always have a plan in mind for the next opportunity.

4 Bill Gross: “Two and two will always equal four.”

The fund manager of PIMCO’s $252 billion Total Return Fund claims the words of financier Bernard Baruch, who said there will never be a way to get something for nothing.

5 Howard Schulz: “Leave your ego at the door.”

The founder and chairman of Starbucks gleaned this wisdom from leadership guru Warren Bennis of USC. He learned to recognize skills in others to help him build a high-quality company.

6 George Soros: “Fight losing causes.”

Billionaire philanthropist and hedge fund manager Soros once met an anti-Communist dissident who told him he had spent his entire life fighting losing battles, which Soros believes sums up philanthropic work perfectly.

7 Bill Gates: “Keep things simple.”

This bit of advice was from one billionaire to another. Warren Buffett taught the Microsoft magnate to break things down and focus on the things that really count.

8 Reed Hastings: “Strategy is about what you’re not doing.”

Netflix founder and CEO Hastings has steered his company based on Jim Collins’ idea that having an effective strategy means making difficult decisions to not do things, rather than have a giant “to-do” list.

To read all 50 quotations please see here

Wendy Jones is part of Interiors & Lifestyle Futures, which provides business support to the West Midlands community of interiors & lifestyle companies. Find out more at ILFutures