We are on fire! With an amazing batch of interviews heading your way. This week we caught up with Lauren Currie who is an incredible force to be reckoned with. She’s got an OBE dontcha know!
Over to you Lauren…
Tell us about yourself and Letter Love Shop.
Ahoy! My name is Lauren. I’m a mother, a designer and an entrepreneur. Letter Love Shop creates wild alphabet artwork for the little people you love. We make letters, names and alphabets.
What was your inspiration to launch a new business this year?
It happened by accident. My baby was two weeks late so I busied myself by drawing their name for their nursery. I wanted to create something gender-neutral focused on animals and nature. Chris is a biologist and I love building ideas that carry a progressive message. When I saw how our friends and family reacted to my first sketch of Atlas’ name I knew I’d created something really unique.
A quick sprint of research revealed two key insights.
The majority of children’s artwork is gendered in both content and colour.
We believe that marketing any item to "boys" or "girls" reinforces harmful stereotypes.
Children’s artwork lacks variety and diversity of animals. There are too many Giraffes, Elephants, and Bears and not enough Komodo Dragons, Jackals and Mayflies.
We believe that the current and possibly the next generation will suffer from nature deficit disorder and are in an educational tragedy, we want to inform and inspire using the complexity and wonder of our natural world.
I get joy from launching ideas into the world. It was the perfect distraction whilst I waited for Atlas to arrive. We both stayed up into the small hours; me in the kitchen drawing all fifty-two letters of the alphabet and Chris in the living room building our Shopify site.
Our business will be 1 year old at the end of Jan 2019. We have spent no money on marketing and have sold over 80 products to 40 customers across Europe and Australia.
We sell three products; individual letters, names and the alphabet. We make all three products in any size and ship all over the world (free shipping!) £1 from every product we sell goes to Pregnant Then Screwed; a remarkable charity fighting to end maternity discrimination. I’m proud to be a chairperson on their board and can’t wait for the UK’s Festival of Motherhood and Work on Jan 19th!
What are your top 3 tips for starting something new and completely different from your career?
I love this question! It made me realise that actually what we’re building at Letter Love Shop has a few things in common with the work I’ve been doing for the past 10 years. It’s about craft, service and insight. Of course, I know absolutely nothing about selling artwork online or in retail... I’m always hungry for advice. My top three tips are:
You can use the internet to learn most things:
If there is a gap in your knowledge or skillset holding you back from starting - use the internet to learn the bare minimum.
Ask for help:
The first thing I did when I had this idea was to chat with my friend Tash, an amazing illustrator. The second thing I did was research a ‘hit list’ of people who are at the top of their game in this stuff - it’s amazing who will have time to give advice to a small unknown business if indeed you only ask! The first to reply was Toby Hextall, Head of Product Design at MOO.COM, and Lisa Donati at Gie It Laldy. Neither of them knew me or Letter Love Shop beforehand, I’m kinda proud that they do now.
Lean in to what you are:
This learning has really hit home for me over the last two months of launching NOBL in the UK. It’s tempting to exaggerate your client list or headcount. I choose to do neither of those things across all of my businesses. At NOBL, we’re purposefully designed to be small with low overheads so we can deliver complex, intimate work fast. Letter Love Shop is my wee family. Chris and I are a couple and we’ve just had our first baby. It’s just the three of us. When I look at Letter Love Shop competitors, I’m momentarily tempted to glorify the truth but instead, I lean into what we are; a family business inspired by our love for our little boy.
What was the best bit of advice you were given and who gave you it?
Oh, that’s easy! Prototype.
For as long as I can remember I have had a very strong bias towards action and doing. When I was little I wanted to have my own copy of Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl. My impatience to have my own copy instantly led to me typing every single one of the 9387 words on my typewriter. Studying design and launching my own business at a very young age only strengthened this muscle.
We had 5 letters drawn and this gave us enough data to know that people would pay for this product. This is the email we sent to a small group of trusted friends for our first round of feedback (click image to expand).
What’s your ambition for Letter Love Shop?
Short term we’d like to get our product into local shops as well as high street brands like John Lewis. Long term, we’d like Letter Love Shop to take the best bits from Cath Kidston and Lush to build a home furnishing retail store that promotes nature and equality whilst supporting the rights of working parents.
We’ve focused on animals and nature for now, and we might stay there, but I think there is a market for the same work focused on cities, pets and hobbies.
Here’s how you can help
We have a bunch of email addresses of buyers and wholesalers and I don’t really know where to begin - any advice?
If you run a nursery, playgroup or a school we’d love to send you one of our alphabets.
If you run a cafe or a restaurant, our products make the perfect colouring in book for little ones during meal times.
And of course, buy our product and use this special 10% discount code for friends of Paved With Gold: Gold01. It’s true that every time we get a sale Chris and I do a little dance in our kitchen.
What’s the tune that motivates you through the long nights?
I’m really loving this tune right now.
You can email Lauren at Lauren@letterloveshop.co.uk or get her on Twitter check out our Instagram to see lots of happy babs with their illustrations.