The Poundshop

Earlier this week there was a talk from George Wu who is one of the founders of The Poundshop.

The Poundshop is a series of pop-up shops in & around London that brings life back into empty/derelict shops & buildings.

They take submissions from budding designers & makers, selling a small range of their work within their pop-up shops. The only catch being that your work will only be sold for either £1 or £5. I found the whole process really intriguing, how something that cost 50p to make would then be sold for £1 with the designer taking 40p profit & The Poundshop taking 10p. It was interesting to see how things could potentially sell for higher. George showed us an example of some hand carved beads for bracelets, sets of 3 that make up the full image of an animal, with each bead sold seperately at £1 each. Clever. 

The video above shows a hand built cart that the team used to go on a 'Summer Tour' last year. They sold items from the cart rather than in a store.

The talk was really interesting & got me thinking about different ways of getting work out there. I would love to do something like this in the future.