The Curator Company blog

Send us pics of your Photocurator photo walls!

Just after getting back from The Melbourne Design Market, I was emailed by photographer, Chris Tung who was asking about putting together a large photowall and whether there was a discount for larger orders. Well there is – so if you are also interested in putting together a large display of your photographs then email me and I can see what kind of deal I can cut you

Anyway, Chris has put together a great looking photowall on his blog here: http://ccht8.blogspot.com/ also check out his other photos he takes some great shots!

The way Chris has put together his photo wall is quite interesting and quite rhythmical.  Which made me think – ‘How is everyone else putting together their photo walls?’ – maybe I could think of a competition where there is voting (by you) and of course a prize or two… or maybe putting together photo walls with the photocurator is not a competitive thing… what do you think? Let me know in the comments on whether you would be interested in posting pics of your photocurator photo walls and whether you think there should be prizes and we can go from there!

Incoming

A pleasant surprise this morning as I discovered Apartment Therapy have written an article about the photo curator mounts. Hi to all the new visitors from Apartment Therapy, if you have any questions please drop me a line!

Just got back from Melbourne

Another action packed weekend at my third market – and first time at the Melbourne Design Market

Thanks to all that came down and said hello – I sold out of stock for the second time in record time – half way through the day!! I thought I had easily made up enough packs for everyone, I logistically couldn’t have brought any more packs with me due to weight restrictions. Maybe next time I will have to ship down a large container load!

To all those who came down but were unable to secure a pack (or a business card/flyer)  sorry about that – I would never have thought how popular the photo curator would be!! But feel free to visit the curator online shop and order a pack from there.

Well two more weeks from now and I will be back at the Powerhouse Museum for the Young Blood markets ‘Xmas edition’ – so two weeks of making up packs, I will be going flat tack to make up enough for Dec 12th/13th – but last time I sold out at the Young Blood so you may have to act fast or you may miss out again!

Dank St and Paddington markets

Since the Young Blood Market at the Powerhouse I have been busy setting up ‘The Curator Company’ as a private company and processing all the admin that setting up a company entails.

About a month after the Young Blood market (and all the publicity I received) I found out that someone has recently started the process of trademarking the word Photowall. As it is a rather generic term I am not too annoyed, I mean if you move too slowly then these things happen!

Anyway, I don’t plan to use this blog to spread negativity, so on a positive note we have designed a brand new identity for the product, which I will not be revealing until I have protected it. Believe me it’s genius!

Everything else is moving along at a rapid pace now, with plans to sell in other countries and manufacturing going to the next level. I no longer need to be pouring resin and filing the mounts by hand! I was starting to get a little worried about my health with the thousands of mounts I was making up at home.

The weekend of the 25th and 26th of October is a big one for market sales. On the 25th of October a friend with a stall at Paddington Market (Ursula) is going to help out by selling the newly manufactured mounts. While on the 26th of October I will be down at the Dank st festival designer markets selling the newly made mounts. Come down and say hi!

Exhausted but ready to go

Well after 3 weeks of making photowall mounts, filing off the edges, sticking adhesive and making up packs – I can now say that I have posted out all of the packs that were ordered at the Young Blood Market 08.

After receiving quotes from a couple of manufacturers I now need to step it up and look at how I can increase production to meet the growing demand.

There are still a few things that also need my attention – such as adding more content to the website and sorting out shipping and distribution… better get onto it!

Thanks again!

Huw

Thanks!

Well what an experience! Three days & one night of market mayhem at the Young Blood Designers Market – I don’t know where to start.

The support and amazingly positive feedback from everyone that came down was overwhelming. Thank you to all who came down and ordered/purchased packs from my stall, I have never sold out of wall mounts so quickly!

I now have orders that will keep me busy making up packs for the next few weeks or more (as more orders flow in via the online shop) so please bear with me as I will be pouring, filing, sticking adhesive non-stop for the next week or two to keep up with the demand.

Thanks to the Powerhouse for all of their support & hard work it was very much appreciated & I hope Louise, Jane and Krispin have a low impact, relaxing week ahead – they did a great job.

A major thanks to Steve who helped out on the stall with me and spent his Friday night helping make up packs for the next day at the market, he did a great job as well helping out on the stall it was very much appreciated!

Thanks to Jacqueline from Millicent & Frank for helping me hand write some business cards when I ran out of those – who would have guessed I would go through 1500 cards in one weekend!!

And of course SJ who was incredible as always.

Over the next few weeks as I complete the orders that have been made I will post up some of the feedback/questions I received at the market and will make some updates to the site.

Thanks again
Huw

Design Market

As part of the Design Week in Sydney the Powerhouse Museum is putting on the Young Blood Design Market.

I went to last years market and found a lot of similar people doing & selling similar type of stuff – so I signed up for this years market. Last Friday I got the email saying it was ‘all on’. So I now need to get into production mode and start casting up a few packs for the 4 day event… I wonder how many packs I will need?

Low supplies

After a week of getting on the case of my adhesive supplier my new batch of tape finally arrived. Because I was unable to fulfill some orders at the speed I see as tolerable I had to apologise to my customers for their slow deliveries. Not a pleasant experience, I have now ordered an extra batch of adhesive so it doesn’t happen again! I suppose I’m slowly coming to grips with the whole ‘supply chain’ thing now too…

Traffic bump

About 8 months ago I commented on a cool DIY photo wall idea over at lifehacker. The DIY photo wall must have made it onto a popular site somewhere and due to my little comment I got a little bump (an extra 100 visitors) on the stats for curator.com.au – it’s amazing how it all links up

Adwords

More tinkering on the website has led me down the road of google adwords. I thought I would give it a try to see how it works.

Well, to start with I can say it is a lot of fun, some might even say addictive. You can spend as much or as little as you want and present ads of many variations targeted at different locations. Once you have some stats – using google’s Analytics – you can start tweaking the copy and targeting to see how this effects the click through rates and impressions viewed. Currently my CTR is pretty low, so I might need to hone my copy writing skills!