Author Archives: ameliaflorencesimmons

Small Business

Posted in Business, Social Media by

Happy Monday, dear readers. I promised you a break from the incessant talking about Tracy Anderson, frozen treats, and calories. (Although, if you wanted to know, today I did half an hour of Tracy’s cardio, and I nearly died, but I still love her, and I also made some frozen yogurt, and…oh. Ok.)

No, today, I am going to talk about something a bit different. Ah yes. The small business. I never thought that a year on from working in a call centre, and 6 months after working as an ad agency drone, I’d be doing what I’m doing: designing and making my own jewellery, and building my own website to sell from online. The ideas just slowly clicked into place – my course in fashion design at Central St Martins, my love of all things techie, my obsessive love of fashion, my strong convictions about how to promote yourself as a company, my strict aesthetic tastes….Combine that with the fact that I can NEVER find the jewellery I want to wear, and you’ve got it. Bingo.

Now, I’m not kidding myself. We’re in a double dip recession, apparently (‘sounds yums’ as Giles Wemmbley Hogg says), the luxury market is holding firm but it’s the small retailers who get hit, the people who make and sell their own things, etc etc. Ebay has become a complete buyers market. Everything is disaster. Doom, gloom, sob. I’m keeping expectations low – I don’t for one moment think I’ll be able to make enough to live on, and equally, I wouldn’t want this to be the only thing I do.

But setting apart the thorny issue of money, the things I have learnt in the past couple of months have been infinitely more valuable than what I learnt in any job so far. I didn’t realise how much I’d have to learn. I sat, furrowed of brow and square eyed, working out how to install WordPress onto my domain name. I learnt technical terms I’d never come across before. With the help of Youtube, I worked hard at learning how to build a website that looked the way I wanted, as opposed to using the disastrous Website Builder that came with my domain name. I had a specific idea of what I wanted, and I wasn’t going to stop until I got there.

It’s been infinitely more hard than I expected. I’ve worked for 16 hours straight, not moving from my computer screen. My head is full of ideas and thoughts, and I’ve long since sacrificed a good night of sleep for my overactive imagination. I’ve had to be everything, designer, maker of the jewellery, stylist, photographer, website builder, PR girl, and all before the website has even launched! Despite the fact that I no longer go into an office to work, I’ve worked more than double the hours of my former, exhausting Account Exec role. I work most of the weekend, and when I come offline I still work on things on my phone. Or sketch a design. Or start planning my next collection. Or work some costs out.

And this is for THE TINIEST BUSINESS IN THE WORLD! I have so much respect for anyone who does this, because it is TOUGH. I’ve started reading all those articles on young people who’ve started up a company, on a scale much bigger than me, and it’s very inspiring. And there are loads of you out there! I know, because I follow a lot of you on Twitter!

Despite the hard work, I’ve kept powering on because ultimately, I get the final say in everything. I haven’t ever had this kind of freedom in my working life. Should that header be Century Gothic? I say yes. I’ll change it. Don’t like the copy on one page? No worries, I’ll change it. I choose the way everything looks, feels, reads. Yes, I’m a complete control freak. But it’s intoxicating. I love doing it. I want to keep doing it. I can be as creative or ‘out there’ as I like, and there’s no one standing over me to reign me in (hopefully, this is a good thing!)

Every day in the UK, I hear bad news about unemployment figures for young people. This is the time to try something different. I don’t want to get into a full time office job and be all fidgety because I didn’t do what I wanted when I had the chance. I’ve learned more new skills doing this than I know what to do with, and it’s helped me understand which sides of a business I’m better at, and which I need help with. I’ve had fantastic support from friends, not least of all my wonderful friend Mikey who waded in when I was about to break the internet, and saved the day.

So, for all of you entrepreneurs out there, I think you’re ace. Let me know what you do, and how you’ve found it.

 

 

Healthy living: End of Week 1

Posted in Health & Beauty by

With the zeal of anyone who has just started a new healthy eating/exercising plan, I raced through the week with few problems. There is no week easier than the first week when you’re changing your habits, as I’m sure most of you will know. Actually, the first couple of weeks are usually pretty golden. You’re evangelical about your new eating plan, and you tell anyone who will listen that they’ve ‘really got to try’ it, it’s ‘already made such a huge difference’. ‘Sugar? You know, you reeeeally shouldn’t eat that’, etc etc. You become a diet bore. You tend to see results quickly, depending on how bad a state you were in before. Everything is glorious, and you’re in a permanent good mood. Come weeks 3/4, it may well be a different story, but hey – let’s stick with week one.

I managed to exercise everyday, focussing on different bits of my body to exercise with Cassey’s POP Pilates videos. Then I’d finish off with 10-20 minutes of cardio. Saturday was an all cardio day, and I rediscovered Billy Blanks’ Tae Bo, a workout video (yes, video) I’d used to get me into shape in my teens. Ah, the sweaty nostalgia of it all. But that’s enough about my personal life, back to the exercising.

I was like a woman possessed – logging my food and exercise every day on MyFitnessPal.com, spending my ‘spare’ (haha) time on researching the best workouts to follow. I’m very happy to be following Cassey and her ‘blogilates’. She’s a lovely cheery presence and puts a smile on my face for the rest of the day. Useful, as I tend to workout in the morning.

Yesterday, I finally paid attention to the name that I’d heard floating around but had never really registered. Tracy Anderson. The great pretender, as some call her, or Gwyneth and Madonna’s personal trainer, to everyone else. She seems to have completely divided the fitness world. She has very strict beliefs, e.g. women shouldn’t lift more than 3lbs if they want to have thin arms. She’s created a form of exercise called ‘dance cardio’, and I’ve been told she tends to give little instruction and smile even less.

The programme of exercise that works for you is a very personal thing, so it was little wonder that I found such a dichotomy of opinion. I’ve danced for a substantial portion of my life, so can pick up routines quite quickly, and I don’t necessarily need a running commentary on it. I also hate doing weights, I really struggle to lift anything very heavy, so that side of things works for me to. The only thing to do was to try it. I looked up some of her free webcasts, along with a routine she did with Nicole Richie, and I absolutely LOVED them. It made me sweat (sorry, disgusting), which I welcomed as Pilates makes me sore but doesn’t yield any perspiration (was that less horrible sounding?!) I enjoyed all the hopping about and twisting round and kicking (sounds like my last date…badoom tish.) I liked Tracy, I found her to be earnest and not nauseatingly false.

So, I’ll be adding about 20 minutes of her to the end of my Pilates for next week, as I felt my cardio was lacking last week. I’ve also purchased the Snog healthy treats cookbook – £7.07 on Ebay as opposed to £17 in Smith’s. I love love love Snog, and it’s a beautiful book – I’ll blog a couple of recipes from it once I’ve tried them, so you can all join in. I’ve got a detox cookery class with Nosh Detox coming up on Thursday too, in South Ken. Should be fun, and I’ll report back on that too. I know it feels anti-instinctive to be doing this health kick now instead of January, but I just see it as getting a head start on my New Year’s Resolutions. I refuse to sit back, make excuses, and get even more unhealthy over the festive period. Let me know if you’re doing anything similar, or if you keep a fitness blog yourself

I promise these self obsessed health blogs won’t be the only thing I talk about these days – I’ve just been super duper busy setting up my jewellery business (nearly there, fingers crossed!), and my free time is either spent writing articles, or visiting spas and fashion events and things. I know, I know. It’s a tough life. But someone’s got to do it.

Big fat healthy Snogs xx

Tracy Anderson, my new queen

Frozen yog - my new ice cream

 

POP Pilates, the anti-bikini body, and a challenge…

Posted in Health & Beauty by

Oh, Autumn/Winter. A good season for so many reasons, not least of all fantastic parties, open log fires, steaming cups of Earl Grey on drizzly days, tramping through woods, rubbish but totally brilliant black and white films in the afternoon, mulled wine…..

Weirdly, I seem to always get into some sort of heavy duty exercise/eating routine around this time of year. I naturally like salads and lighter food, so I get to a point in Winter where I don’t want to see a potato, or a hearty stew, or something with mushrooms in. I also feel like I’m getting one up on my New Year’s resolutions. Because, after all, who feels like changing anything on January 1st? I’m usually nursing a hangover and feeling violent unease at the prospect of the new year.

I’ve been trying to eat fairly healthily at the moment, but had a bit of a lapse this weekend, and I can already feel the results. I feel sluggish (the worst word known to man), unmotivated, and generally not a very happy bunny. I’ve been doing some Pilates videos I found on YouTube, hosted by a very smiley and cheerful girl called Cassey Ho. I used to think Pilates was pretty much like yoga – ok for flexibility, but generally still the home of mung bean eating, New Age music-listening, crystal waving types. Then along came Cassey, with her glam gym gear, her huge smile, her insanely tough workouts, and a soundtrack including Shakira, Gaga and Rihanna.

I barely managed 2 minutes of one workout, and I realised that this was something I really wanted to do, and get good at. I went and checked out Cassey’s site: http://www.blogilates.com. It’s amazing – bright colours, inspirational stories, motivational slogans all over the place. It’s very, very American, and I loved it. I spotted Cassey was running a 90 day challenge (sadly with only 60 days to go) comprising of 5 days of pilates/cardio workouts a week, combined with a good healthy diet. It seemed destined to be. So much of being able to motivate yourself and keep pushing through when you’re flagging is having someone energetic, encouraging and aspirational, and I think Cassey manages to achieve all of those things.

Right, waffle over. Go and check her out. Don’t blame me if you get sore thighs (ah…how many times have I said that in my life?!) Basically, I’m going to attempt to follow her challenge – not quite to the letter, because I’m not exactly going to be eating a stir fry for Christmas lunch, am I? But I’m going to try. Out go the cakes again, refined sugars and bad carbs, in come the fruit and veg and porridge. I’ll be attempting to track in on this blog – only every week though. Nobody needs to know what I’m eating every single day, for Chrissakes. Have a look yourself – maybe you’ll be joining me?!

http://blogilates.com/

Winter

Posted in Fashion, Positive Thinking by

Prepare yourself for an extremely lazy post. Essentially, I’ve been too busy writing things for other people to write anything for myself, so what you have here is a collection of pretty pictures (all courtesy of the outrageously sexy Google images) that make me think of the festive time of year. Just giving my poor old tired brain a rest…

Upper East Side

Posted in Business, Gems by

For the past couple of months, I’ve been busily working on getting a jewellery line together, which I’ll eventually be selling via my own website, www.uppereast.co.uk (up and running very soon, I absolutely promise). For now, here’s a little teaser for my first collection. It’s not finished at the moment, a complete and utter work in progress, but I put together a little video just to tease it. Take a look!

How We Made Our Millions

Posted in Culture, Films & TV by

It was with a new interest that I spotted ‘Peter Jones: How We Made Our Millions’ on the TV schedule last night. Usually, this would be the kind of programme I wouldn’t touch with the proverbial barge pole, but since I’ve been starting to set the tiniest of all small businesses – my jewellery company – I’m suddenly an avid viewer of all this business malarkey. ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Dragons Den’ now get my undivided attention (rare – I’m usually drawing or texting or daydreaming when I watch TV). The continuity announcer intoned something about lingerie and smoothies, which led me to the conclusion that this was either a program about odd but harmless fetishes, or it was going to be that ‘woman with the terrible hair extensions’ who founded Ultimo (Michelle Mone), and ‘that chap from Innocent’ (Richard Reed). I was bang on the money, so to speak. Especially about the terrible hair extensions.

I watched the first ten minutes in delight. I knew from their amusing bottles that Innocent weren’t going to be the standard company, and I was overjoyed to see something that appealed entirely to me, with my crushing fear of authority and dislike of conventional working environments. Everything about Innocent sent me into paroxysms of happiness: the spinning wheel used to help them make decisions on smoothie flavours, their homely communal areas, their t shirts and beards and smiles. Peter Jones commented frequently on how out of place he felt, and seemed faintly appalled at the working environment. A particular focus of his ire was a sort of woven basket chair that hung by Richard Reed’s desk, designed to make it easy for employees to talk to each other.

Fruit Towers

I know I’ll be biased here, because Innocent is exactly the kind of company I’d love to work for one day, or I’d at least like to adopt some of Reed’s Messiah-like charisma and management style. But Jones seemed to have decided prior to filming exactly what his angle was going to be, and he was determined to lead the programme with that in mind, instead of being open to possibilities. It seemed he’d gone for this:

Innocent and Ultimo, two ostensibly similar companies in terms of success, including a brush with bankruptcy for both, and with each represented by a figurehead who will be the main subject of the documentary. The similarities end here: Reed, a Cambridge graduate, has formed a company based on ‘hippie’ values. Why, then, did they ‘sell out’ and allow Coca Cola to buy a portion of the company? Can they really all turf up in t shirts and give huge amounts of money to charity? Mone, conversely, came from incredibly humble beginnings, has worked hard for her success, and as Scotland’s first billionaire, is an exceptionally influential businesswoman. Does that mean she doesn’t suffer any insecurities?

And that was how he was determined to keep it. I found this to be unbelievably reductive, and blinkered him from pursuing the interesting insights thrown up as he talked to his subjects. I’ll expand: despite graduating from Cambridge, Reed was in no way the ‘privileged posho’ Jones seemed to want him to be. They included a brief section where Reed explained how he’d grown up in Huddersfield, that his parents had worked hard to educate him, and that he’d exited a stint in a dog biscuit factory as the ‘brush’ to start a lawn mowing company at the age of 15. Part of the programme was to take the entrepreneurs back to a place which had formed a seminal part of their upbringing. Jones elected to take Mone back to her tiny house and run down school, and yet took Reed to Cambridge, overlooking the opportunity to swipe him back to the dog biscuit factory that formed an important part of his business life.

The programme progressed. Away we went to Scotland, and to Ultimo HQ. Michelle Mone, all tight jeans, peroxide and unsuitable eye make up, introduced Jones to the building, explaining how it was shaped like a breast. This did nothing to assuage my feeling that Mone  veered very much to the ‘tacky’ side of the taste spectrum. Like I said, I’m writing this as a middle class, privately educated, largely pretentious 23 year old. I’m enthusiastic about new management styles passed down from innovative American companies like Google. I have ridiculously strong aesthetic beliefs. I apologise for not being able to look at this objectively, and pulling Jones up for exactly the same. I actually admired Michelle Mone on her recent stint on Sleb Masterchef, and genuinely liked the woman – this show changed my opinion irrevocably.

Mone took Jones up to meet her staff, who were entirely mute, just nodding when asked questions. The desks were freakishly tidy. Her PA looked tired and put upon but still enthusiastic. She waved Jones into her ginormous office (Reed had none, instead working in a corner of the open plan office, to encourage ease of communication with other staff). She showed off the wallpaper made of her press clippings. She explained she’d all but die for her company. Fine – you can’t argue with her dedication, only her taste. Excuse me for a brief foray into vacuity, but I simply cannot understand how a woman worth that much appears to have purchased the cheapest hair extensions known to man. I can’t stop looking at the ratty things.

Michelle Mone

Anyway. Breathe. On the programme went, showing Reed with schoolchildren, tossing fruit into a sheet, on the beach with his friends looking serene, eating on a picnic bench with the serfs in the middle of the canteen. Mone was pictured lounging on a…well, a lounger, cocktail in hand, in some glamorous destination. Jones took Mone to a restaurant and pressed her to talk about the death of her brother when she was young, and revisited the house she grew up in, where her neighbour had kept all her clippings (save yourself the effort, love – Michelle could provide you with some lovely wallpaper of the same thing).

As we reached the vital last quarter of an hour, Mone was shown getting emotional, while Jones started a line of questioning with Reed that I found to be the least palatable thing in the whole programme. Jones kept trying to make him admit he was ‘in it for the money’. I’m not sure I’ll be able to form cohesive sentences here, but what on earth was the point in asking that? Firstly, Jones seemed to be imply that the company was selling out by making money, and yet Reed explained that they gave huge portions of it away, had started plenty of charitable initiatives, as well as events like ‘Fruitstock’ which they mounted to ‘reward their customers’. Reed never claimed not to be a good businessman, and I can’t see how them turning a profit makes him a bad person?! It was a limp line of questioning, with Jones attempting to catch him out.

Richard Reed

Jones summed up by saying something along the lines of how he was ‘relieved’ to have made Reed admit he was ‘in it for the money’. He then said what a fantastic time he’d had with Mone, and how she was a real and vulnerable person underneath the tough business exterior, etc etc. Not a word was said about Mone’s charitable initiatives, if there were any. I’d have really liked to see this programme done differently  – examining the similarities between the companies, or Jones taking the same tough line of questioning with Mone as he did with Reed. After all, if he was going to push Reed about the financial viability of his company, couldn’t he have questioned Mone on her altruistic side, if such a side existed?

Ultimately, it was a frustrating thing to watch. Questioning Mone’s PA in front of her and national TV cameras was hardly going to yield the truth about working there. All I can say is, I know which one I’d rather be working for. And in case you’re still in the dark, it wouldn’t be the breast shaped building.