When is a clock not just a clock? When it’s also a beautiful piece of modern art and a hint at the part of your story that took place in a wonderful location.
Sometimes when we think of a new product, we can turn it around pretty darn quickly. You all know that personalised prints are our core and the beauty of that is that we always have the raw materials to hand; super design skills and fine art paper!
So when we developed our coastline clocks (which use no paper at all - gasp) we had to start at the very beginning and explore all sorts of design ideas, investigate beautiful materials to work with and source the very nicest components.
Let’s start with the design. There’s something quite Dali-esque about our new clocks, with those undulating curves that time itself has carved away from our coastlines. We faithfully recreate all those inlets and bays to capture an important coastal location. It could be the beautiful beaches that you visited on your honeymoon, or the familiar seaside town you had fish and chips at with your family as a kid. Whichever stretch of coastline you like, we can recreate it for you.
Then we started to investigate all the beautiful woods that exist out there. Oh my! I can tell you I spent ages pawing over all the different colours and veneers and textures and smells – yes of course smells! With woods like Eucalyptus, Cedar and Pine the aromas in the studio were just divine.
For our coastline clock bases we use veneers over an MDF core for reasons of stability and practicality. You just cannot buy sheets of thin wood in a solid wood, for one main reason, they warp like crazy! So if you wanted an actual Dali clock, then with solid wood you’d have one pretty quickly! So, completely solid wood is just not an option. This is not bad news at all, quite the contrary.
For a start, with veneers you only use a thin slice of the wood, around 2mm. So that one beautiful tree is used extremely economically and responsibly. Our wood suppliers understand this very well and we were super impressed with their excellent environmental values.
Once we had chosen a selection of amazing wood types, we then had to see how well each one engraved. As all trees have different properties, they all engrave slightly differently. We had to be able to achieve something that was legible and a pleasing colour. For this part of the process we use our super funky Trotec 300 laser engraver, creating a permanent mark in the wood. We had to turn down some gorgeous varieties of wood just because of the way the engraving came out, but that still left us with a solid range of 6 utterly perfect woods.
Now, onto the acrylic detailing. You would be forgiven for thinking that acrylic is acrylic and there isn’t much to say about it. And when it comes to acrylic that you can cut on our hero of a laser cutter, that’s mostly true. But guess what? We found something sleeker, smoother, and altogether sexier. It doesn’t scratch like the standard acrylic is prone to, and the colours, oh the colours, be still my beating heart! Safe to say we fell in love with it a little more than is strictly “normal”. And the juxtaposition of that smooth man made surface against the grainy patination of the natural wood was exactly the contrast we were after.
Form was now well and truly taken care of. Now we started to look at function. And I’m not suggesting that was the right order to go about it, but what can I say, we’re artists first and foremost.
Would a clock that depicted a coastline make a ticking noise? Well, possibly. We’ve already talked about the very fact that our physical coastlines are carved by the ravages of time and tide, and that certainly isn’t a quiet event. But when we looked at why you would want to recall a coastline, at the events that become a part of your story there, we concluded that ultimately coastlines are wistful and dreamlike. Magical things happen there like engagements, weddings (dare we say conceptions?) and of course the everyday magic of just having fun with loved ones. Peaceful things happen there like solitary walks in and out of the surf, meditative stone tower building, dozing in the sun with a paperback. None of these things said loud, annoying ticking.
Therefore we selected clock mechanisms with no ticking noise, rather a smooth constant rolling around of the second hand reminiscent of gentle rolling waves.
All in all, we’re delighted with the results. I hope you will be too.
To buy our new coastline clock, please click here. And the best news is it's on an introductory offer until the end of May = £60 instead of the normal £70.
Since the very first days of Betsy Benn way back in the cold and snowy winter of 2010 (nearly five years ago now!!) I've been creating and designing more and more lovely things and we've kept on growing and getting busier every year. I've been extremely fortunate that you, my lovely and incredibly clever customers, like what we do and keep returning and that some of you must tell your friends as well! Our very own "story of us" hasn't really changed very much in those five years. We've moved offices (twice) as we've got bigger, we have more Betsy's who help me design and create and make the beautiful prints and gifts we sell, and we eat more brownies and slurp more hot chocolate as a result. But the essence of what Betsy Benn is and does hasn't really changed, and I think that's a good thing. If you order a personalised print from us at Betsy Benn, we don't wave a magic wand. We don't have a whizzy thingamajig that "designs" your print as you type your life and memories into the computer screen that then gets automatically printed and posted without anyone looking at it. We have something that we think is more important, and that something makes your print or gift special to us as well. We have our lovely people who work here at Betsy Benn. Our personalised prints and gifts are created the same way we've always done them (just with more Betsy's!). Each personalised order is received and a designer makes a decision about what looks and fits best. Simples! This means that when something leaves here on its way to you we know it's been created with your approval and our design and material quality.
Betsy Benn meets Monty the Penguin[/caption]
It seems that you, our wonderful customers, are being incredibly well organised this year as things are getting noticeably festive at Betsy Benn towers. In anticipation for the festive period, when our team of Betsy Benn elves need ultimate sustinance, we've already carried out random checks on those refreshment points that keep us fed and watered during the run up to Christmas.
There are some lovely establishments in Cheltenham - so in the interests of science we have tried to taste test as many staple foods and beverages as possible. This of course really means that Hotel Chocolat, Huffkins, The Tavern, Costa@Waterstones and the Star Bistro at Pepper Crescent have been scrutinised thoroughly and all have passed the Betsy Benn taste and nutrition test for chocolate content, perfectly moist buns, ease of calorie inhalation and general scrumminess. As difficult as this has been, we feel we have had to undertake this rigorous testing on your behalf! Without these lovely establishments, we may never get through to Christmas....
Which brings me to my original intention in writing this humble post. Our Personalised Christmas wooden tag decorations as seen at our partners notonthehighstreet.com are literally flying out of the door (as if by Christmas elf magic). We think they are beautiful and will not just make great additions to your presents, but can then be hung from the tree and kept as keepsakes. They are the perfect gift to add to your personalised Christmas presents.
Made from utterly gorgeous, totally sustainable bamboo, we've three types of personalised tag for you to choose from:
So for about a year now we have been thinking about the nature of some of our personalised prints. They can be very detailed and not particularly easy to photograph as a whole piece. And the best part of each design is the story behind it. The amount of thought and work that our customers put into the content is quite astounding. So we really wanted to capture some of that emotion, with the aim of having some lovely videos that prospective customers could watch so that they had a better understanding of what is achievable.
Today we filmed Gordon Hall and Helen Redfern, along with their lovely designs, and are now in full on edit mode. Once the films are ready we'll let you know.
We have quite the variety of personalised prints, we'll give you a brief catch up on them below - don't worry, we won't ramble on.
Bus Blind Prints - great for capturing particular places
Coastal Prints - for the coastal lovers, of course!
Iconic city prints - for the city lovers who can't get enough of cities and their busy nature
Travel prints - born for the travel lovers who NEED to capture their travels and memories, or have at least some type of photographic evidence.
While we wait for the video to be produced, browse our range of prints today.
It would be the hugest understatement in the world to say we aren't just a little excited and nervous at the moment!!!! Not only are we approaching our fourth birthday but this Thursday evening we will find out whether we have won the highly prestigious title of Business of the Year in the Gloucestershire Women In Business Awards. We'd like to thank the sponsors of these incredible awards, Grundon, EDF Energy, HSBC Commercial Banking and Circle2Success for shortlisting us from all of the incredible businesses in Gloucestershire that entered.
And we'd like to wish our fellow finalists good luck, HRML, (Heather Resource Management Ltd) from Twigworth - who gave us our first valuable insight into the world of HR when we took on our very first employee - and Orange Tree Toys who make the best and brightest wooden toys for kids; our own bear was obsessed with his Orange Tree push along stripy Lion. Our fingers and toes are very much crossed and whether we win or not we're proud as punch and there may well be some special offers to help us celebrate or help us commiserate so stay tuned! Gloucestershire Women In Business Awards
We're proud to introduce our musicality MP3 mug that we've designed. It's a great mug perfect for music lovers as it features MP3 and Ipod prints all around. It even works a treat for homeware gifts - you know those are extremely difficult to buy for? Why not jazz up their mug collection a little bit? It's certainly something different and for a low cost of £10.00, you can't really go wrong.
You can buy the musicality design mug here, we provide several delivery options so if you're needing it in a rush, don't worry we've got your back.
Please don't hesitate to browse our full range of personalised gifts for music lovers - keep this on the down low, but we're quite proud of our selection.
A gift for the gift giver!
Every year during our busy Christmas season, we like to include a little something when sending out our framed prints. Last year we included some gorgeous Christmas cards by the lovely Dots And Spots along with some yummy chocolates. The response we had from our customers was delightful. They were really touched to receive a little something extra and felt it added a unique festive element to their online shopping experience.
With Christmas approaching we wanted to carry on the tradition – we have a high percentage of repeat customers so we wouldn’t want to disappoint them! We had a ponder about the right kind of gift to give them, that would be universally loved, was perceived as a luxury item and was from a company that shared our brand values and ethics. Our first thought was of Green & Blacks. Not only do we love their entire product range, from bar to ice cream, but we admire and aspire to their ethos and principles – more of which can be read about here.
So using our powers of persuasion and charm, we wrote a little letter to the Green & Blacks marketing team. We knew that they must get lots of requests similar to ours so we needed to grab their attention. We demonstrated why they should buddy up with us over the Christmas season and how great it would be for both our brands to be associated with one another.
We had a big preamble, explaining who we are and what we do and set out our proposition. Then we cheekily listed reasons why they should say yes, which included: • Because you are lovely • Because we are a small, niche, British company developing our own luxury brand and you know all about that • We too use fine organic ingredients that are ethically sourced (but for us that means FSC approved timber frames made by a local family run firm of framers) • Because we will make a lot of customers smile and eat chocolate • Getting a taster of your fine chocolate will remind our customers that they need chocolate for Christmas and will go out and buy yours • You get the feel good factor of knowing that you have supported an up and coming UK designer in her quest to make the world a prettier place • Because Father Christmas will know and will put a “p” for present and not a “c” for coal next to your name on his list.
So it turns out that Green & Blacks rather liked our idea and the lovely Laura in marketing got back in touch to say that they thought our letter was great and that they would be thrilled to support us with our Christmas promotion. Laura explained it wasn’t something they did very often so we felt really honoured that they wanted to partner with us during such a busy trading period.
We are now anticipating a lovely delivery of miniature Green & Blacks chocolate ready to ship out to our Christmas shopping customers! (We think it was the last reason that really swung it for us.) The bars will be included with all our framed prints from the beginning of November, whilst stocks last. Betsy’s absolute favourite flavour is Butterscotch so if we get a lot of those she says we may need an official Keeper of the Chocolate.
In the spirit of giving, we sent Green & Black their very own Betsy Benn Personalised print as a little thank you for their support! We hope you all have a very Merry Chocolate, er we mean Christmas, shopping experience! Love, The Betsy Benn Team xx
Just one of the reasons that I love being a partner on NotOnTheHighStreet.com is the annual Make, Do and Meet partner and company get together. This event has evolved from an evening nibbles and drinks and chat event, into a full day of presentations, workshops and account meetings, thankfully still with nibbles and drinks and chat!
This was the third event that I have attended and they just keep getting better. It started with a talk from founders Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish about the successes of the company over the past 12 months and the plans for the next 12 months and beyond. Accompanied by some slightly scary projections for exactly how busy we'll all be at Christmas, Holly had some great advice about keeping your turnaround times short and your stock levels high enough to cope with demand. It's great for us to get the opportunity to speak to Holly and Sophie and see just how much passion they still have for their business.
There are always presentations from some fantastic complimentary businesses. The one I found most useful was from Pretty Little Head with their insights into the retail side of the female brain. I will definitely be purchasing their book. A new part to the event was the partner panel, a chance to hear from some established partners about how they do what they do with a Q&A at the end. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the panel along with my pal, Wendy, at Letterfest and Katy from TillieMint.
There was capacity in the room for about 100 people, so it wasn't going to be too intimidating and we got to see the questions that Jenny from NotOnTheHighStreet would ask us in advance (not that I used that opportunity to plan what I would say - oh no, that would have been clever. Instead I rambled on about trolls predicting the future for me and accidentally finding myself in Waitrose instead of Tescos a bit more these days).
When we arrived though there was a virtual sea of people and it was standing room only for a while, until that was also full and they had to turn some people away. I think we were all shocked to see how popular a slot it was - especially as we were on at the same time as lunch! It was actually really fun to take part in and there were some great audience questions at the end, including "Is it worth offering framed prints as well as unframed?" Answer - definitely yes from me and Wendy. Actually I think you should tackle it the other way round and start with offering framed prints and ask whether it would be worth also giving the option of unframed prints. When people purchase a gift (which is what most of our items are) they generally prefer a complete solution. Another question was "Where do you look for your staff?" and all of us had started with friends, Mums, neighbours, friends of friends etc! But we also recommended Gumtree, local universities or colleges, and local jobs boards. Our lovely local resource is GlosJobs which is how the lovely Ellie found us! We will also be looking at internships as well over the coming months. After a quick bit of lunch it was on to the awards ceremony. We were shortlisted for Best New Product for our Personalised Playlist Cassette Print although I didn't think we had a chance of winning. On the one hand we were up against some really good products the "Kids Rule" wooden height chart by Lovestruck Interiors and the charming Feather Bauble by Button Box Cards. We'd also won an award in each of the previous two years so thought that we would be really pushing our luck with three years in a row. In fact I was so convinced it wouldn't be us that when Holly announced our name it took a good few seconds for it to sink in.
When I spoke to Sophie later on I expressed how certain I was that it wouldn't have been us, especially after our previous successes. It was apparently a very close run thing and they did consider whether they could give us another award! But she said the message to everyone was that if you keep on being great, we will keep on recognising you. I think the grin on my face after that probably blinded several low flying aircraft! But by far the best element of the event is the chance to meet other partners and say hello in person when all you have ever done is tweeted to each other before. We have met some funny (as in ha ha, not odd!), brilliant and talented people and it's fantastic and inspiring to spend a day in their company. A couple of photos later and a glass of champagne in hand I took a few moments to reflect on how positive an experience I have had with NotOnTheHighStreet. It has revolutionised our business in ways I couldn't have imagined and the continued investment we receive in soft skills, advice, product guidelines and just being associated with a beautiful, aspirational brand makes becoming a partner one of the best decisions I have ever made! Roll on Make, Do and Meet 2014.
It seems our very first ever design, the Quintessentially British print, has found love in a new home. Last week we were suddenly getting lots of enquiries from Australia for our Quintessentially British Print and tea towel which has the phrase "A Nice Cup Of Tea" (in a proper bone china cup) along the central cross of the Union Jack. After a bit of digging we found that one of our prints that we had sent over to Australia last year, had been photographed in a 'before and after' feature in the Australian Real Living magazine, and beautifully photographed at that.
The tea towel is currently out of stock (due to a sudden rush of overseas purchases!) but more are being printed as we speak. They make great gifts to send to family and friends overseas, we've even had parents pack their children off with them when going on exchange visits as a gift for the host family. It's lovely to see our first 'baby' in the spotlight again, she'll always have a soft spot in our hearts!
You can capture the British-ness of your home with this print, from only £19.00! Order online today or browse our range in full to spice up your home!
As I'm beginning to understand, adverts, much like buses, seem to come along in two's. Earlier last month I was honoured to have my Personalised Destination Print shown not once but twice in NotOnTheHighStreet.com's first TV advert. Now, I'm just as chuffed to have my Personalised Quotation Print take pride of place in the TV advert for the NOTHS.com Mother's Day campaign. Our first Personalised Quote Print came about after we were asked to create a very special print for one of the founders of notonthehighstreet.com by none other than her Mum.
Betsy Benn Personalised Quotation Print as seen in NOTHS.COM's advert
As well as that, my Personalised Quote Print makes it a hat trick of front covers for Not On the High Street Catalogues after our Personalised Destination Print featured on last years Valentines Day catalogue, and our favourite Personalised Family Values Print was the face of the Winter Catalogue. Lastly, Betsy Benn has outgrown it's humble home and is moving to a purpose built office at the end of the garden! Updates and photo's coming soon!
