Wow it’s been such an amazing week here at Knots & Kisses! Last Friday I attended the most amazing wedding industry event … Chosen Wedding Collective’s ‘The Hub’. A day filled with inspirational talks by some amazing women, I went there thinking I would get lots of practical advice on how to increase orders and improve my business … and this was available in bucket loads! What I wasn’t expecting though was to come away feeling inspired, revitalised, focused and actually happier beyond belief about my future than I have been in ages and confident of a totally new way of working! I created the above image a few weeks ago when Kiki, who runs the Chosen Wedding Collective, asked me to produce some postcards for the bags that were being handed out on the day. Little did I know at the time how true the ‘Be Inspired’ motto was going to be!
Practicly I got some amazing tips from Madeleine Noble Jones, Kate Cullen and Anna Tyler about SEO, Pinterest and Legal Rights which were amazingly helpful. Amy from Bo Boutique got me really thinking about my business and how to progress and make it more about what I want to do. There was also the most inspirational talk from the wonderful Charlie Kingsland-Barrow about how we work and why we do what we do – which left me so motivated, even though she made me dance in public! , that I virtually ran back to my desk on Monday morning to start implementing some of the things we had talked about.
Talks from the wonderful Cat Hepple and Tamyrn Lawrence had me almost in tears as they revealed the passion that lay behind their work and showed me that I needed to get back to what started my passion for stationery way back when I started Knots & Kisses 6 years ago. It got me thinking about really writing blog posts that were from the heart rather than just ‘throwing stuff out there’ because I felt I needed to blog.
Cat got me thinking about really why I create stationery … I started to think about how much I loved to inspire people to put fun, colour and creativity into their own lives. How passionate I can get when a splash of colour can brighten up a dull grey day, whether that be putting on a bright yellow scarf before heading out the door or enjoying watching the bright blue and yellow flash of a blue tit out the kitchen window yesterday whilst making my morning cup of tea. My whole life is about things not being beige! And that is what started Knots & Kisses really … not the friends and work colleagues who needed the stationery, or the need to do something more creative with my life, which are the usual answers I give … but the feeling like I needed to inject a bit of colour and personality into things!
So Knots & Kisses is about colour and fun and textures and prettiness .. and most importantly about me and my clients expressing our personality through stationery. It is about that feeling that I get when I have sent a bespoke design off to a client and they come back and they are over the moon because it fits their wedding so perfectly, and my heart skips a beat when I get the email … because what if it was wrong, what if my instincts weren’t right … and then I punch the air and squeal slightly when they say how much they love it!
It is about me unashamedly admitting that I love flowers and florals and filling my house with flowers at any given opportunity, and so yes lots of my stationery has a floral theme. Its about loving trends and trying out new colour schemes and patterns and loving pretty bits of lace and ribbon and the texture of brown kraft card and twine. It’s about fun and frippery and not being embarrassed about that.
It’s about taking your ‘marriage’ seriously but having fun with your ‘wedding’.
So from now on I’m going to think about all of this every time I write a blog post, post a picture on instagram or start on a design for a client or a new range of stationery, because I want to put this sense of fun and colour into everything I do.
Have a wonderful, colourful weekend!
Nikki x