Colour is an act of rebellion.

Thanks so much for all of your recent responses to my emails. I am blown away by the communal enthusiasm for my musings, particularly those related to the importance of community and local commerce, and their impact on quality of life.

Caroline and I have been away for a while, in Kenya, settling our youngest daughter Kinvara into a new chapter of her life there. I mention this for two reasons; first, despite being generally hot on my inbox, I am a little bit behind on replying to some of you, apologies, and second/third, because it reminded me of two of the core foundations of this business, craft and colour, both of which are boundless in Kenya. I filled a suitcase with blankets.

Colour has become Caroline and my design USP, I think. If you know any of our businesses, you will recognize a strong and confident affinity with colour. I have written about confidence of taste before, the key tenet here being that confidence of taste is what people mean when they talk about good taste. If you say, ‘she has amazing taste’ what you generally mean is ‘she has real confidence in her taste and that shines through’.

Embracing colour has worked commercially for us for many years and it seems that, with G / H, the objects and clothing that embrace colour are the ones that people are responding to most passionately. This pink jumper is now nearly sold out, for example and these bandanas in confident pink and orange, have already sold out. I suppose the lesson here is to embrace what you love most.

My taste for colour came, I think, from growing up in a big, old house that didn’t embrace it at all. Brown furniture, dark oils, green walls. It is a lovely house, but it needed some colour, as colour is life. So, when we took it on, we added a lot of colour as a way of saying ‘we live here, welcome, this is our taste which respects the past but also embraces the future’.

There is something almost apocalyptic about the way much of the world currently fails to embrace colour. We wear dark clothes, drive dark cars, sit on black office chairs, use black laptops. It’s a way of keeping your head down, of blending in. In the UK in 2024/5, two-thirds of all new cars were black, grey or white. In the 1990s, two-thirds were bright, expressive colours: red, blue, green, yellow. It’s the same with clothing, as you can see when you look around.

But we all -most of us at least- love a bit of colour in our lives, and there is absolutely no doubt that it sparks joy in ourselves and those around us. You don’t need to go crazy but do think about adding colour somewhere in your life. A scarf, print, whatever.

And at a time when government is failing, when we finally understand that no party gives a shit about us, when the Times put a Peter Mandelson puff piece on the front cover of their magazine a couple of months after he has been sacked as ambassador, when, well, you know… I think colour is a small and important act of rebellion.