New Beginnings

With a mild scent of blossom in the air and bulbs of spring ebbing closer, we are drawn to our next steps and new beginnings. I like to think of Springtime as the start of the calendar year.  It has a little more optimism in the air compared with pressure that January wears. Year-end figures, organisation updates, and self-assessment administration is under control, and there is space for wilder thinking. And so, our Less-is-More journey continues and as promised, we are bringing you along with us. The second half of 2023 saw us tackle this approach throughout our products and systems across the business. Now we need to spend time considering our communication channels and how we continue to tell our story. There is so much noise out there these days. It is a true metaphorical tightrope of keeping Alice Made This in your thoughts for those meaningful moments, with an anguish not to clutter your already busy minds with nonsense and ‘just because’ information.

As a creative I thrive on spending time the ‘doing’, however spending time ‘articulating the doing’ into polished content is most definitely not a strength. Humans have built big successful agencies to manage this kind of role and many a large operation has the ability to outsource this work to these specialists (at a price!). But the smaller outfits out there, like us, navigate this responsibility in-house. It is a fast paced, time consuming, entire departments worth of work, and is an area that can gorge into the creative thinking time and space.

With this in mind we are making a decision to celebrate the raw, in terms of our communications. What does this mean? To be honest – I am not entirely sure yet! What I do know is that we can think of it as the coarse, the unprocessed, the untouched or untreated … perhaps it is better to call it the organic, the wholesome and the natural! We are making the decision to go more casual, more behind the scenes, and more experimental with our communications. The picture below shows the tail end of a 9 month studio and home life being a van. As chaotic as it has been, it also pares back to a delightfully simple way of living (if a touch frosty!). With a home that is almost liveable, we will move onto renovating the studio space. It will take a while as it is also an ‘in-house’ project, but we are excited to get into the space, start unpacking our materials, get experimenting, and bring the current state of mind on to paper and into product…and I can’t wait to share this with you.