Keeping it Weird: Lazy Oaf's 15th Anniversary Exhibition

For 15 colourful years, London-based fashion brand Lazy Oaf has been keeping it weird with their bold, distinctive designs. Smashing cartoon-style illustration against witty down-beat captions and weird, wonky youthful nostalgia they've been keeping smiles on our faces a long, long time.

What better way to mark such a momentous anniversary, than to bring iconic Lazy Oaf icons to life as giant sculptures in their very own art exhibition! We took a trip to Lazy Land. And we loved it.  

Housed in Protein Studios, Shoreditch, Lazy Land visitors entered the exhibition via the mouth of a giant, pink, inflatable head (of course!). A whole gang of super-sized, 3D Lazy Oaf characters delighted crowds of fans and curious passersby. From bonkers cats constructed from tiles and poodles with pink tennis ball hairdos, nude blockheads and 'floating' boggly eyes, these residents of Lazy Land, as imagined and designed by Lazy Oaf founder Gemma Sheil, gave such fun insights into the playful thinking behind the brand. And, as hoards of excitable camera phone wielding visitors will testify, Lazy Land was definitely up there with the most Instagrammable events of the year! 

And to think, Lazy Oaf was born out of a collection of fun, screenprinted t-shirt designs and a stall at Spitalfields Market. Gemma Shiel, you are an inspiration! Here's to plenty more years of Lazy Oaf. Keep it weird. 

Searching for an alternative funding model

Earlier this year, Make Works approached us to see how they can improve awareness of how people can support the Make Works platform. 

Make Works is a factory finding resource where you can discover incredible makers, manufacturers, material suppliers and workshops. They create beautiful videos and a platform for manufacturers to showcase their work. It opens up the often hidden ways to work these manufacturers, which is especially useful for small makers.

We went off to investigate a bunch of different options for Make Works, and discovered Patreon. A crowdfunding platform with a twist; the idea is that people who really care about your project being out there in the world become a Patron, and support it in small amounts each month. 

Fi at Make Works loved Patreon's open approach so we reached out to them to start building their campaign. We worked with Patreon and Make Works to create a campaign page that would ignite their community's passion and make it as easy as possible to support Make Works. 

Make Works have written a great article about why they are looking at these alternative funding models, and how this applies to other not for profit organisations who don't quite fit that traditional VC funding model.

Meet Ding, the beautifully simple smart Doorbell!

We're very excited to introduce Ding - a smart doorbell that has been designed to fit into your home. No more dumb, overly techy doorbells for us. 

They've just launched on Kickstarter and have raised nearly $40,000 so far. 

We've been supporting Ding by giving them end-to-end Kickstarter support - helping them manage their Kickstarter project, managing their PR campaign, online content and social media campaign. 

You can support them by checking out their Kickstarter page. 

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Core 77

 

Map Project Office x Kickstarter at London Design Week

We've had a great week running around London Design Festival. Our friends Map were celebrated by Kickstarter and had a wonderful talk and little shop in their office for people to pop along and see the projects they've been working on over the past year. 

There's been lots of great coverage of it, including Core 77 (who we've pinched these photos from) and you'll also spot a couple of our lovely clients in there too!