Ready....Set...GO

Here are a few pics of the sales team getting the display ready for the Private View:

We like, we like to party

On Tuesday 25th October we hosted our All That Glitters IS Gold party at the Sunflower Lounge.
Tickets sold out for the night the day before and a lot of money had been raised through their sales. But would it still be a good party?!
Well, it was. We thought so anyway! We had a DJ, a cheap cheap bar, free shots of Sambuca and free bar snacks! Ummm!

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, some more than others it has to be said!

Anyway, take a look at these pictures and see what a good time everyone had:

It's Jammin'

Our find raising is going brilliantly! We've had even more cake sales and on Tuesday we had a Home Made Jam Sale. The anuty of Pickle's Esther Horsfield donated a large batch of home made jams and jellies for us to sell to raise money for the company. They sold oh-so-well! So thanks 'Esther's Aunt' for your generous contribution to Pickle!

Critiquin'

Last Friday the group had arranged to have a critique of each others' work to check on what stage people were at and that they were on the right track. A few of us were a little stuck on what direction we wanted to take our development now, but with help from the other Pickle members and our Artist In Residence Stephanie Arm, we had new ideas on 3D experimentation, materials and concepts.

Opening Night

The sales team had been looking into venues for our opening night. They visited various sights and gave a presentation to the rest of the company on their top 3. The company then took a vote on their favourite venue which led to an almost unanimous decision.
Our choices were:
-The Drop Forge resturant/bar in the jewellery quarter
-St Paul's Gallery, also located in the jewellery quarter
and the Custard Factory, located in Digbeth and know for vintage/boutique fashion
The group felt that the Custard Factory was too far away to attract a lot of interest. We wanted somewhere close to School and close to the people in the jewellery quarter that we were hoping would come along. The site was also very expensive to hire which put a lot of us off.
St Paul's Gallery was free for us to use but, as it's an art gallery with permanent pieces, our work would be displayed alongside the work of other artists/designers.
The Drop Forge was a clear favourite for most people. It was free, has a beautiful space and would enable us to have a fun and vibrant atmosphere as it's a bar! As well as being an opportunity to sell our work, our opening night will be a celebration of our companies hard work all paying off.
We're still going to have St Paul's Gallery as a selling venue but had to rule out the Custard Factory because of the price.

Check out The Drop Forge

And the winners are....

Congratulations to Sam from BA3 who guessed how many sweets were in the jar and to Pippa from ED who won our raffle and won the lovely hamper of organic, home grown veg donated by the parents of Pickle's very own Alice Clarke. She also won herself £5! Not bad eh?
Thanks to everyone that took part. You helped us to raise a LOT of money to fund our company!

Tweet Tweet!

Aaaand now we have a Twitter!
http://twitter.com/#!/picklejewellery

All That Glitters IS Gold

We've created an exciting new event!
To help us to raise company funds we decided to throw a party!! As we're jewellers and love all things gold, silver, sparkly and shiny, we decided to throw a GLITTER party! 'An excellent idea!' you say? Why thank you! We know, we know!
We decided on a date, on a venue and booked it, and then created the poster! Now all that's left to do is to make and sell the tickets and book a DJ!

We have a logo!

Thanks to the excellent work of Julie Brown and Ami Victoria Pepper we had our logo design, but it still needed refining. We knew exactly what we wanted to do with it but it just needed doing. Thank the Lord for Katie Loewy, a member of the Publicity and Marketing team who is a dab hand at Photoshop! She made all the changes we needed and gave us our finished logo. HERE IT IS..

Now we've been able to launch our Facebook page- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001662885934&ref=ts#!/pages/Pickle/199116706827635 , create events and update the website. It's all so very exciting!

FUNd raising

Today we had our first proper fund raising event. Volunteering members of the class made various scrumptious delights to sell to other people at the School.
We had:
Guinness and Ginger cake
Vanilla and Raspberry cupcakes
Chocolate Cornflake cakes
and Chocolate Biscuit cake.
The cupcakes were the first to sell out, swiftly followed by the biscuit cake. The Guinness and Ginger cake came a close third, just leaving us with the Cornflake cakes. Being intelligent folk we didn't give up but reduced the price and persisted with the hard sell. It all paid off! EVERYTHING sold out and we made lots of juicy profit to add to the kitty.

Logo Designs

Today we decided to get ourselves a logo! It's something that we needed  before we could start creating posters, fliers, a website and even a Facebook page. Head of Marketing assigned her team the job of designing at least five different designs to present to the rest of the team later that day. Some people from other teams with less to do at this stage agreed to help too so there was a large amount to pick from when we came to choose our favourites.
Common ideas that seemed to keep cropping up in the designs were the idea of incorporating jars and the idea of using an actual Pickle as our symbol. It soon transpired that, in actual fact, the majority of the group detested the idea of using an actual Pickle so, after putting it to a vote, we moved the designs featuring Pickles to one side and concentrated on the ones with jars.
We continued to look through all of the designs and decided that we'd only keep the ones that at least five people picked as their favourites. From this the clear favourites were:

This design is by Ami Victoria Pepper, a member of the Sales Team that was keen to get involved in a creative aspect of the business.

And...

This design is my Julie Brown, the Deputy Team Leader of the Publicity and Marketing Team.

Everyone was excited at the idea of a collaboration of the two ides. We loved the subtle aesthetics of Ami's design but thought that Julie's layout and branding was more fitting. We can't wait to see the finished result!!

In a bit of a...

We needed a name! We needed a name because we needed a concept and a brief. We were to draw inspiration from our name to create the brief.
We'd spent the previous afternoon trying to generate ideas for a name, and, after a lot of discussion, had some favourite names/concepts. These were:
-Juality
-Jeuality-Jual
(these all came from the word 'dual', with the idea of combinations, with the 'J' to add the association with 'jewels')
- Pickle (we liked the idea of naming ourselves after something that Jewellers use and the more we thought about the associations with this word the more it seemed suited to what we wanted to represent ourselves as)
-Odyssey

-BAC(so BA followed by 'C' which would represent alternative words such as 'Creative'to describe us as a group)
From these we selected four favourites:
-Pickle
-BAC
-Juality

-Odyssey

And on Friday we chose our favourite. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of difference of opinion. We'd decided that a tagline would make a big difference to how the company was perceived, and that even with a slightly stranger name we'd be recognisable for what we are with a good tagline.
So we put it to the vote. Everyone had their own piece of paper, upon which to write their favourite of the options. We'd taken 'Juality' out of the mix after looking online an finding other companies with the same/similar name. The votes were counted by an independent adjudicator (our Artist In Residence Stephanie Arm) and, with around 50% of the votes, Pickle was selected as the name for our company, with the tagline "A compote of contemporary design".

So, we are Pickle. It's all very exciting. It felt like gaining a name gained us our identity. Our story is on a roll!

Who Are We?

On Thursday 30th September 2011 our company met again. At this point we still had no name, no concept and no direction. It was time to sort this out!
On this day, we, a group of second year BA students, met as a company for the first time. Over the summer we'd collected a pool of research into different jewellery companies. The choices ranged from small boutiques to large highstreet chains. We presented our research to eachother and from it collected our opinions on what we did/didn't want our company to be like. It was a VERY long day but we got through it and it was definitely beneficial to us all. We all seemed to be on the same page with regards to what we wanted to achieve and seemed to be unanimous on what we didn't want to represent ourselves as.

Role Allocation

Our first duty as a company was to form our departments and from those elect Heads of Departments, so on Tuesday 27th September we talked through the roles of each department and split ourselves into teams.
Heads of departments are as follows:
Chair - Casey Fenn
Head Of Sales - Claire Dureden
Head Of Publicity and Marketing - Caitlin Gregory-Thomas
Head Of Accounts - Katie Snow
Head Of Production And Stock - Emma Burfoot
Head Of Admin  - Esther Horsefield

We Are Pickle

You have found yourself on the blog of Pickle Jewellery. What is Pickle Jewellery you might ask? We're are a collective of  second year students from the Birmingham School Of Jewellery and are all studying a BA in Jewellery and Sliversmithing.
This is our story...