76 I started the business as something to do while deciding what to do next after finishing a psychology degree. This was way back in the mid-1970s in Berkeley California, after a series of serendipitous encounters involving a head shop in Leicester, a talking mynah bird in English Bay Vancouver and a person styling herself on Gorilla Graphics in San Francisco. Soon afterwards my ex partner and I were selling badges made with hand cut shapes made from diffraction gratings, (the forerunner of holographic foils) stuck onto copper enamel shapes in the famous daily craft market on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We called ourselves Diffractions. It was an exciting time with tourists from all over the world and an incredible array of weird and wonderful people and crafts. It was wildly successful and after 18 months we went travelling round Europe on the proceeds. After that it was downhill all the way for a few years! Fast forward to 1984. Back with childhood sweetheart Vicky and sitting in an orange wall-papered shower room in Leamington Spa making earrings out of holographic foils, tiddly winks and acetate. This quickly led to providing wholesale ‘laser earrings’ to a company I set up with friends in 1979. This went well until the said company went under at the height of 15 percent interest rates. In 1998 we moved to Devon to start again. We made glow in the dark ‘Dizzy Discs’, Laser Earrings, ‘designer’ photo-etched jewellery, and crystal window ornaments. We were thinking, ‘Aren’t we clever making such a variety of different products” – big mistake! A conversation with a Business Link adviser pointed out the stupidity of this approach within five minutes of meeting her. Ever since then, Wild Things has focussed on crystal window ornaments. We combine crystals and mirror-bright metal motifs. Our staples are our little angels and Crystal Fantasies. Over lockdown we started working on designing fullcoloured versions which work like stained glass. The response has been tremendous! Often you know you have a ‘hot new product’ as soon as the idea becomes reality. The one that really took us by surprise though was the Radiant Heart of Hearts. It retails at £25 and is quite small and delicate, so we had to keep checking the figures to make sure there hadn’t been some kind of mistake. We have added a tree of life version and that sells even better! We only follow trends to the extent that when things like cats and dogs sell really well we bring out more cat and dog designs. Things like sustainability are
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