Lee Cottey, come on down!

A huge thank you to anyone who completed our survey a few weeks ago. We promised that someone would win a £25 M&S voucher, and indeed they have - Lee Cottey, who we met at the Millennium Centre Wedding Fair in January was our lucky winner.

Thanks again to all of you who replied, we really appreciate your time and feedback.

Keeping the dream alive...

And so to lesson three in our little series on setting up Illustries, one we're sure that many new business ideas go through. Something that has surprised us in getting Illustries off the ground is that time is even more elastic than we thought. We did things properly, brainstormed and business-planned, made sales forecasts and plotted growth curves – and if we’d stuck to the prescribed timetable, we’d have given up the day jobs and be running Illustries from the Bahamas by now. The reality? When you’re trying to keep the wolf from the door, sometimes the dream has to take a back seat, and that’s frustrating.  

Lesson Three: everything takes longer than you think (but the good stuff – for us, stuff like seeing our name on the wall of the Saatchi Gallery for the Luxury Wedding Show – is worth waiting for!).

A new BFF

Part two in the Illustries sharing series! Today, working together...

One of the best things about forming Illustries has been working together. We both run our own companies, so striking out alone wasn’t as scary as it could have been, but this was our first time as ‘partners’. It could have gone either way, we suppose, we didn’t know each other well before ‘getting into bed’ (ah, such a familiar tale) but we knew we liked what we saw. We’ve been lucky because we have forged a really solid friendship out of working together, and perhaps some of that comes from not being able to second guess the other person, so you don’t assume you know what they think – you get everything out on the table and talk about it. 

Today, we are loving what we do, and dream of the time we get to have an office together – for now, we make do with meetings, Skype and wedding fairs, usually accompanied by too much beer to celebrate. As we came to launch Illustries we learned so much about each other, not least that Sam is a little cautious and Emma is a lot gung ho. 

Lesson Two most definitely was: not everyone has the same style and that’s fine, you can find a happy medium (ours is that we take risks, but not all of them). 

We're in a sharing mood...

We’re six months on from our official launch at the Luxury Wedding Show (have you read our post on that one?!) and we thought we’d share our humble experience of launching into the big, wide wedding industry, not because we like talking about ourselves (well we kind of do, but that’s not why) but because we really wondered how everyone else got started and whether our experience so far is par for the course. You know how it is, you have a few drinks, slam a few tequilas and before you know it you’ve formed a business. Or, is that just us (we’re sure it’s not)?

So, we learned a few lessons along the way. First up, Lesson one...

We guess every business starts with a good idea – well, we hope ours did. Emma got married, had some beautiful photographs and one of those great big old albums, but wanted something a bit more ‘her’. She’s a writer by trade (we’re sure you know this by now, she bangs on about it all the time), so wanted to include some of her pesky words with those gorgeous images. Try as she might, the photobook options were too inflexible (ever tried adding words to those things?!) and impersonal – she’s a princess, so when she says I want ‘teal’, she want teal, not light blue. Sam is a graphic designer (when she wants teal she wants Pantone 3155), and we had worked together a couple of times. We chatted a bit in a conversation that shall henceforth be known as Albumgate, had those few drinks, slammed those tequilas and Illustries was born. Today we’re creating beautiful, bespoke memory books that reflect each very individual couple, combining a written love story with some creative design in a true one-off.

Now that’s enough about our books, we’re not here to sell them to you. We just wondered if all you creative people out there went through the same kind of agonies in birthing your own ‘babies’, the same highs and lows, the squealing with excitement moments and the times you despair that it will ever work out? In our day jobs, we’ve both worked on some huge brands. But when it’s your own? Different story. One of the things that gobsmacked us was how hard it was to come up with a name. Illustries was up there pretty early on (it’s short for Illustrated Histories) but we went round the houses for DAYS, trying out loads of other options (some were truly awful, ‘Dreams of Your Past’ anyone?) before ending up back where we started. Illustries it was – the thing that swung it for us was mocking up a logo and seeing how it looked as a real brand. Actually that’s a lie, because we had two possibles and in the end we all but tossed a coin and went with one. 

Our first lesson: it’s amazing that sometimes it isn’t the decision you make that is important, you just need to make a decision.