News from Gladstone / Hellen.
This week I want to update you on a few things that are going on here.
People. Sarah is having a baby in December. She swears she’ll be back in the Gladstone / Hellen groove pretty soon, but let’s see.
Anniversary. Somewhat tangentially, we have just passed the eleventh anniversary of the launch of our festival The Good Life Experience, which we stopped doing just after/during lockdown in order to create Summer Camp which was a more intimate and focused iteration of the original event.
I mention this because The Good Life Experience was substantially dedicated to British craft and tried to imagine what The Good Life might look like if made real. Both of these affected, or even catalyzed, the creation of Gladstone / Hellen.
The Good Life Experience was great, and we entertained tens of thousands of guests over the course of its life. But it was almost unbearably hard work, and we never managed to get it to make a profit; we got incredibly close, but we never got there. Having said that, I am super proud of what we did achieve, and it led to all sorts of brilliant things including this business and Summer Camp. (Summer Camp 2026 is sold out. Yes indeed!).
One day I should probably tell you in detail about how hard running a festival is.
Photos. We’ve just done what is probably our final photoshoot of this year. That’s about a dozen this year. Because we don’t have a bricks and mortar shops, we need great photos and we’re super happy with everything that we’ve generated this year. We made the decision early on to work with lots of different photographers, in order to keep things fresh and it has definitely worked.
Julian, Joya, Daisy, Arran, Sophie, Ros and Fran. Thank you.
What a dream team that is.
Working with a photographer is an intimate thing, you spend long days together, it is hard physical work, sometimes challenging and you have hours and hours of chat. I think that if you still like someone after you’ve worked on a photoshoot for a few days, then you really like them.
Product. Remember, there’s no business like slow business.
We might be slow, but we have not been idle. We will have lots of new products by the end of the month.
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. In 1982 The Fun Boy Three and Bananarama (I am not sure I’ve ever written that name before, what an amazing word) recorded one of the greatest cover versions ever. It’s a slogan that we’ve co-opted for this new collection and inside lots of our products you’ll find a label reminding you of this mantra. The idea is that a bag is not a bag, it’s the way that it’s been made and what it’s been made of that counts.
Cecil Beaton Party. In October we’re hosting a party to celebrate our exhibition, Cecil Beaton: A Family Archive. Details are here.
I can’t think of anything else particularly interesting at the moment. We are trying to figure out how to physically show you our products before Christmas, but we need a little more headspace for that. I hope we can make it happen.
