Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - January / February 2021

91 COMPANY PROFILE by constantly extending our offering. We look at currently popular art movements and try to respond to these, often creating new ranges in the process. When asked to create products to run in museum shops alongside a particular exhibition we often take the most successful ideas from these to add to our product ranges. We always try to be aware of trends but not tied to them in any way. We feel that our products are unique to our way of working and to our mode of expression. What sets you apart from your competitors? We feel that we are different in that we are always willing to take on projects that will stretch us as designers and craftspeople regardless of financial gain. We totally support the handmade ethos and have no wish to mechanise in a way that would affect the handcrafted nature of our products. Our USP is variety, of which we have much across our many ranges. How are you finding the current climate in the U.K? Is it affecting business? The current climate in the U.K. is affecting business in that it has drastically changed our customer base. At the beginning of the lockdown our museum shop customers, of which we have many, were forced to shut their doors and cancel their longer-term orders but we found that our customers in America, China and Australia were ordering in surprising quantities. We also supply many mail order companies, which were of course greatly increasing their turnover and taking us with them. So, for us the current climate has greatly increased our workload. This brings its own problems in that we have to operate social distancing in our workshop. We have also found over the past months that many of our customers have been able to allocate time for developing new bespoke ranges and ideas for us to work on. Are you active on social media? How is this important for the business? We use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to promote our products. We feel that social media, in the current age, is of vital importance as a platform on which to showcase potential and existing items. It is both a means to exhibit new lines and to gather feedback from our customer base. Do you have any advice for new businesses starting out in the world of gifts? My advice to any new business starting out in the world of gifts would be primarily to price your items at the necessary level to be profitable. You should also search for any funding that may be available for new start-ups, perhaps from national or local government or any charitable organisation, and to invest in a good website which could act as both a catalogue and selling platform if required. Most of all don’t give up. If you enjoy what you are doing keep going and the money will come. What can we expect in the future from the company? In the immediate future we are working on our new Art Deco range using the wonderful but little known textile designs of E.A.Seguy together with equally stunning works by Georges Valmier. In the coming months we plan to use these designs across all our ranges of buttons and jewellery. We now have many collectors of our buttons, based all over the world, which is a direction we would like to expand together with yet more ranges and ideas. We believe that small is beautiful and therefore intend to stay at our current size in order to continue to produce more quality, handcrafted, gift items for our customers to enjoy. STOCKWELL CERAMICS +44 (0)1579 351 035 www.stockwellceramics.co.uk