The Writing's On The Wall- Banksy Inspires Your Life Your Style

I’ll be rooting for the graffiti artist Banksy to win an Oscar tomorrow for his documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. I find his work on outdoor walls inspiring. Don’t worry, I haven’t bought a hooded jacket and a spray can of paint. The streets of Winchester are safe, from me at least.
It’s more about the way he thinks. He shares with great artists of the past the ability to look at an everyday object or scene and find in it something meaningful that the rest didn’t see.
It’s the same kind of eye that enabled Michelangelo to look at a piece of marble that had baffled even other artists and see in it a sculpture of David or Picasso to look at an old bike’s saddle and handlebars and see a goat’s head.
Like Southampton last year, Los Angeles, home of the Oscars, is currently benefiting from Banksy’s imaginative street art, such as the wall of a burnt out building that featured a smiling Charlie Brown with a petrol can and a cigarette.
My favourite is a large poster for a Las Vegas hospitality company which he has transformed into a scene of debauchery featuring a drugged up Minnie Mouse and a drunken Mickey cavorting with the bikini clad woman of the original advertisement. It says a lot about the gap between people’s fantasies and the reality of the high life.
One of my best Christmas presents was a book of Banksy’s art called Wall and Piece. It has given me a lot of inspiration in my work as a retailer. What he and other artists demonstrate is that, by taking the everyday and transforming it, you can create much more attention grabbing, emotionally engaging displays or websites. And if you can do it with humour all the better.
I don’t claim the windows of Your Life Your Style are great art but, when our designer Lyn recently positioned a little paperweight mouse peeking out of a faux fur slipper, she created something that was more than just a display of two products, and that at least nodded in the direction of artists like Banksy.

This article appeared in the Southern Daily Echo

The Naked Truth About Advertising and Underwear

This time of year our shop Your Life Your Style is full of hearts. Glass coasters with hearts fused into them, heart shaped cushions, handmade cards with stuck on hearts… other shops have enough flowers, chocolates and romantic CDs to fill Westminster Abbey. All intended to show we love someone this coming Monday.
Underwear seems a popular choice as a Valentines Day gift but I’m not certain it’s a good idea. I’ve been wondering how men who receive Marks & Spencer’s new BodyMax underwear will feel. To remind you, this is a new range intended to make a man’s abs more flat, his bum more firm, and his maleness… just plain more. All those years your wife or girlfriend has been saying size doesn’t matter and suddenly she buys you ‘frontal enhancement’ underpants.
It's worse still if you buy them for yourself. The trouble with all these body changing clothes, for men or women, is that, once you’ve attracted your potential mate with a bulging crotch or uplifted padded boobs, there comes an inevitable moment of truth. Your pants go down and the mountain brings forth a mouse. The bra comes off and your man’s face drops along with a couple of other things. I suppose we hope that by then our partner will be so overcome by passion, they’ll forgive the deception. Or maybe we just make rely on everything looking better by candlelight.
In business we have no such luxury. The law doesn’t allow us to pretend our product or service is one thing and then hope once the customer has bought it, they’ll just accept the disappointing reality. Nor would it be good business sense. Contrary to a widespread public perception, advertising is not about lying. The industry regulator the Advertising Standards Authority even says in its core statement that advertisements in print, TV and radio must be ‘honest, decent and legal’. It’s about to get tougher for businesses because from 1st March the ASA is taking on complaints about websites.
Shops shouldn’t need legislation to make us honest because truth is our biggest marketing tool. I've always found that if you are honest about your products, describing them accurately, admitting their limitations, even sending customers elsewhere if that is their best bet, and apologising when you get something wrong, your customers will trust you and come back to you again and again.
These days, all good websites allow customers to comment on products and service from the mighty Amazon to our own little (and only slightly enhanced) Your Life Your Style. We don’t always like what is said but it shows customers we have nothing to hide and it is an additional spur to be clear and accurate about what we promise.
Of course you can’t satisfy everybody and we’re all entitled to an opinion. One customer gave a poor review to our ‘rabbit’ draught excluder. There was nothing wrong with its quality but she didn’t like his slightly mad expression! Still, at least we didn’t pretend it was a bigger size.

This article also appeared on the Your Life Your Style Wordpress blog and on the Southern Daily Echo website

Steiff Bears and The Golden Age of Theatre

Last week London’s West End reported an attendance of over 14 million in 2010, missing last year's record by a whisker. A BBC report desribed a 'golden age of theatre'.

So why are we living in this golden age? Partly it’s the quality. If you provide cheap production values and lazy content, audiences stay home. By contrast, last year's West End’s hits are challenging plays and intelligent musicals. But the main reason is, I think, to do with it being live. We’re all aware nowadays of how packaged and mass produced so much of what we consume is, including entertainment. Consequently, there’s an appetite for things that are or appear to be authentic.

At one end of the spectrum, you see it in the popularity of ‘reality’ TV shows and a desire to see behind the celebrity masks. Elsewhere it’s the trend towards naturally produced food or, as I see in my shop Your Life Your Style, the demand for handmade products like Steiff bears and Dartington Glass. A theatrical performance, where we join a live audience to share in the real emotion communicated by actual people, is the organic wholemeal loaf of entertainment.

Whatever the reason for this golden age, it may soon be over. Cuts to arts funding are threatening many great producing theatres, local and national. So, enjoy it while you can.

This post also appeared on Wordpress and on the Daily Echo website in an extended version