Friday 21 July 2017

Picnic I up - it's festival time!

Those long days where the sunlight lasts all evening, the grass smells sweet, the uptempo beat of the music keeps going sound tracking the chatter of your friends: that's what we love about summer.

We're not alone - perhaps it's the proximity to Glastonbury which means Bristol, our home town, is packed full of home grown festivals all summer long. We love it. This weekend is Bristol's biggest festival - the Harbour Festival - which is one of Europe's largest free festivals and takes place around the Harbour Side and other central sites. The crazy mish-mash of out there and loud local bands, contemporary dance troupes who can contort your concept of what shape a human body actually is, local history, the sweet dulcet acoustics of singer songwriters who sing poetry to music and a good helping of Bristol's best food and drink - all come together to make one amazing weekend.

Our new shop premises at Wapping Wharf is within the Harbour Festival site so it will be the first year we're fully part of it. To celebrate, we've a competition to win a set of Rice Melamine - the perfect companion to the festival picnic. The prize includes 4 cups and 4 small bowls in this summer's prints as well as a plate.

To enter all you have to do is like and comment on and share our posts on InstagramFacebook or Twitter before the deadline 28th July 2017. Competition winners will be picked on 31st July and contacted via social media.

Thursday 25 May 2017

Competition Time: Win a Dybdahl Print

Heinrick Dybdahl is a tall Norweigan magpie living in Copenhagen. He's a collector of images. He raids archives for beautiful things, picking them over for the best bits and then meticulously and carefully works on bringing out their beauty.

Read on to win 2 prints - one for you and one for a friend.

His prints are vibrant and full of colour and the result of hours of work restoring and enhancing old found images. Sometimes he cuts those images up or finds finer detail in them, enlarges or shrinks them and crops them to choice bits. The resulting images are a homage to the days when people explored the world through the pages of books and through exhibitions. The days when travel was a real luxury but jumping into a picture was the way people learnt about the mysteries of the world.

We've a chance to win a pair of prints this week - one for you and one for a friend - on our social media channels. You can enter on Instagram, on Facebook and on Twitter and if you enter on all three you will increase your chance of winning. Please note the prints to win will be 30 x 40 in size valued at £20 each, unframed.

Deadline 4th June 2017



To enter on Facebook:


Name the friend you think would like a print in the post

To enter on Instagram


Use their Instagram handle to name the person you think would like a print in the comments below the post

To enter on Twitter


Retweet the post and append the Twitter handle of the person you think would like a print to the end of your retweet


Sunday 23 April 2017

Fig1.2 - Opening Our New Shop

Designing and building our second shop has been a personal creative journey for me. 

The process of opening our second shop has been quite an exciting journey. We first took a look at a new unit at Bristol's Wapping Wharf back in August. Wapping Wharf is a unique development. It's in the docks in Bristol on a previously little used piece of land which has now been opened up as a walk way from South Bristol to the city - a route that takes you into the historic harbour to some of the best of Bristol. More than that, though, and more than other developments of a similar nature it has embraced Bristol's independent and creative spirit, from the metal work detailing by local craftsmen on the buildings to the now bustling selection of completely independent businesses in the area. The man who runs the development company for Wapping Wharf, Stuart Hatton, has been clear from the start that he wanted to create an independent and sustainable community here, not a run of the mill estate. Some of the best of Bristol has gathered at Wapping Wharf and so it was with great excitement that we looked into opening our second outlet there.

For me in particular it has been an opportunity to build something new on to what we already have. Creativity, making new spaces and new businesses are all part of my DNA - my Mum and Dad had several businesses when we were growing up and my Dad was a carpenter. Some of my first interests in interior design were born out of working with the family and so it feels in many ways that Fig2, as we now call the second shop amongst ourselves, was the culmination of years of experience. For me it was like we had a chance to take all the best bits of what I've learnt over the years of running Fig1 and make them sing: a chance to take apart and reassemble the business to really show off what it has become.

I love the process of planning, designing, imagining and building: of learning and creating. 

It's a long and sometimes tiring journey but it is filled with creativity and that is the really good stuff - the stuff I thrive on and love. Nothing beats the satisfaction of getting to the end of  a long and carefully planned project; being able to look at your work and say "I made this".

The process began by redesigning our branding for Fig1 - updating our logo, and developing some brand patterns and styles for our graphics. I worked on the brand update with my sister who is an illustrator. It was a learning process for both of us, but we wanted to do this work ourselves so that what we came up with was a set of graphics which really speak about Fig1 and which are appropriate to the business. What we came up with married design elements - geometric hexagons and rhombuses, an asterisk motif - tied together with more natural elements - paint splodges, textures and pen lines. To us, it's a frame work in which we can speak visually about the creativity and design we love.

This graphics work was first as we wanted it to inform the interiors. I've worked many times with my Dad on interiors projects, helping him design and build furniture for a delicatessen as well as working on the original Fig1 shop. He's retired now but you never truly put down your tools and so, for the shop build, I had the great pleasure of working with him again. A much bigger space than the other shop, we wanted to keep the design elements clean and clear, to use the new branding and to allow space for lighting and furniture.

Part of the process of designing and building is learning. We wanted to work with new materials - plywood with a laminate finish, scaffold pole, industrial lighting but softened and made flexible enough to change with the business. Bringing all these elements together took research, planning and a hard graft with the final build being done in just 4 weeks so we could open before Christmas. We're thrilled with the results and really enjoying meeting new customers and colleagues at Wapping Wharf.

Fig1 Wapping Wharf opened the Saturday before Christmas but will be having a full launch soon.

To Celebrate opening we have a 15% Discount code active until 1st May 2017 of MyOpenShop to use in store or online - download the voucher!