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Face To Face: Emily Coxhead
Bursting With Happiness Spending time in the company of designer, illustrator, writer and photographer Emily Coxhead is nothing less than a joyous experience. Creative, bubbly, talkative and a font of wise, positive words, Emily, 25, is a tour de force when it comes to thinking happy thoughts and spreading good news. As the author of Make Someone Happy and the editor of The Happy News newspaper, Emily also has a clutch of exciting licensees helping her to sprinkle happiness around the world, to include Widdop and Co for giftware, Blueprint for stationery and Pigment for greeting cards. And, as PG&H discovered, happy things keep happening to Emily. With her curly blonde hair, big smile and quirky fashion sense, Emily Coxhead is very much a product of her generation, a Millennial who went to uni (Manchester College of Art, where she made her own greeting cards and Happy Jar gifts, and also had an online shop) and is now forging her way in the world as a young entrepreneur, with social media an integral part of spreading the word. (Fans include internet sensation Zoella who has 10 million followers). Yet, there’s something about Emily that makes her stand out head and shoulders from the crowd. (For one thing, there’s her happy, colourful patchwork jacket that rivals Joseph’s technicolour dreamcoat!). She comes across as a deep thinker, a person who is curious and genuinely cares about others, with a sensitive side to her nature that led to her determination to ‘sprinkle a tiny bit of
Below: Emily’s Make Someone Happy book. Inset: Emily Coxhead reading The Happy News.
happiness all over the planet’. In fact, The Happy Newspaper was born from a sad, deeply personal experience that shook her world (understandably one that she’d rather not go into). “Most people know and appreciate I’m human and that I’m absolutely, definitely not happy all of the time,” she states. “It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I have bad days and struggles to get through just like everyone else, but I try to find the positives whenever I can, although sometimes that’s not easy. Being so sensitive, certain things in the news - the Grenfell fire and the Manchester Arena bombing - seem to affect me more than others, so I only watch the news in small doses.” In a world of continuing uncertainty and unease, Emily highlights that a lot of people of all ages today feel anxious about their life, with social media too, affecting mental health. “It was when I was feeling really down myself four years ago that I started The Happy News, a subscription newspaper celebrating only the good stuff going
The Happy News Licensees l l l l l l
Blueprint (stationery) Creme D’Or (confectionery) H&A (toiletries and cosmetics) Pigment (greeting cards) Portico (calendars and diaries) Widdop and Co. (giftware)
Progressive Gifts & Home Worldwide
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