Designer Dressed Steiff Bears Auction

Steiff Teddy Bears have become one of the most popular items at Your Life Your Style since we introduced them last year, so I thought you might be interested in an auction of Steiffs dressed by top fashion designers. Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, Betty Jackson and Lulu Guinness are among many whose designer bears will be benefitting Living Paintings, a charity who have designed a touch and sound system to bring picture to life those who cannot see.
The auction is at the V & A in London on 25 February 2010. For more details visit Living Paintings.

Is Packaging Your Guilty Pleasure?

We’ve just got in a bunch of lovely new Dora Designs products at Your Life Your Style. Nestled among the Dalmatian draught excluder, the poodle doorstop, the monkey bookends and curled cat paperweight are some new e-leather animal doorstops. E-Leather is a new eco-friendly kind of leather reconstituted from offcuts.

It set me thinking about how we’re all (well, most of us) guilty these days about the effect something we enjoy may have on the environment. It could be driving a car or buying imported vegetables. My own secret pleasure is packaging. For instance, I once bought a pair of Ted Baker underpants just because they came in a box with a lid that was held by a magnet. Most underpants seem to come in some kind of cardboard box even though we all know they could be piled up loose on a table.

My wife got some GHD hair straighteners. I don’t know if they really the best money can buy but their packaging certainly is. I am normally very good at recycling my packaging but I confess I can’t bring myself to throw that particular box away.

Maybe we always need the excitement of doing something wrong. People used to get a secret pleasure from looking at porn but that’s pretty open nowadays. Is packaging  porn for the 21^st century?

Recession. What Recession?

You may wonder how British retailers including my shop Your Life Your Style can be celebrating a record Christmas in the midst of the worst recession since the Second World War? I don't find it surprising. I was marketing a theatre during the 90s recession and ticket sales boomed. Similarly West End theatres boasted record takings last year.

I believe the reason is most people aren't directly affected by a recession. As long as they still have a job, they may even be better off because of lower interest rates on their debts. In troubled economic times, people are wary about the future so they avoid big payments that may increase their debts or reduce their savings, such as holidays or cars, but they still want the pleasure of spending on themselves so they go shopping or treat themselves to day outings. A retail or leisure business blaming the recession for poor figures probably needs to look a little harder for other reasons.


I think we got a false impression about the effect of the recession because of Christmas 2008 when, in the immediate aftermath of the financial collapse, shops started panic discounting. A number of businesses like Woolworth and MFI went bust but these were weak businesses that would have gone anyway. The usual suspects like wrong products, weak marketing, bad location and the threat of online are much more likely to be responsible for poor performance.

Sale Away

The Sales seem to be over pretty quickly this year. Helped no doubt by the Big Freeze, we at Your Life Your Style found that the bargain hunters had dried up by the first week in January and most of our sales were once again full priced gifts and accessories.

We prefer the John Lewis 'clearance' approach, genuinely selling off stock cheaply that we have too much of. I don't like the cynical exploitation of a genuine need favoured by some retailers who buy stock specially for a Sale.
Either way, I imagine Sales did as well for other retailers as for us this year because unlike last year there was very little of the pre-Christmas panic discounting going on and consumers were probably wanting to get their purchases done before VAT went up.

Draught Excluder Sales Boom In Big Freeze

As my mother said to me when I was a little boy and down in the dumps, 'When one door closes, another one opens.' Actually she said, 'When one door closes, another one slams in  your face' but then she always had a good dose of Yorkshire cynicism.
Here's another saying my mother favoured: 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'. Good business advice. It's true that when things go wrong, there is usually an opportunity you hadn't noticed before because you were too busy with things going right. But a shrewd business person will prepare for the bad days. When I was a clothing retailer, I sold t-shirts on hot days and lined jackets when it was cold, wide brimmed hats when it was sunny and wellington boots when it rained.

These last few days our shop in Winchester has suffered from the Big Freeze and everybody not venturing out onto the slippery roads and pavements. On the other hand our Your Life Your Style website has been doing a roaring trade in Dora Designs animal draught excluders. So much so that our total turnover is actually well up on the same time last year.
'Every cloud has a silver lining' as my mother no doubt would have said.