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In Profile
High Five X2
To mark their respective companies’ shared fifth anniversaries, card publishers, Louise Tiler Designs and Tache are inviting the entire global greeting card industry to lunch two days running and will also be putting on a great evening party to boot as cosponsors of the lunchroom and opening day drinks bash at this year’s PG Live show (June 4 and 5). PG caught up with the owners of these two impressive companies who not only both made their trade show debuts at PG Live five years ago but also christened a friendship that has blossomed between the companies’ directors in the ensuing half decade.
Steering the Tiler “We first met Frank and Pennie [the cofounders of Tache] at PG Live five years ago. We have very different looks to our greeting cards, but it is so good to have friends in the industry that are growing at a similar rate, enabling you to share the journey together,” believes Louise Tiler, the namesake of Louise Tiler Designs, who runs the business from its base in Keighley in Yorkshire, with her partner in business and love, Gavin Nicholas. “Being a new publishing company and working most of the year in your own space or office it is so lovely to have the friendship and support from those within the industry,” says Louise, celebrating the relationship she and Gavin have shared with Tache’s Pennie and Frank since their respective debuts at PG Live 2014. While the ‘difficult’ job of the food tasting has now been done (the PG Live legendary veggie lasagne is on the lunch menu!), the designs for the PG Live Gallery Hall, where the lunch and opening night drinks party will take place, are still underwraps with the final tweaks being made to the grand plan hatched by the Louise Tiler and Tache teams. However, at odds with the muchdeserved success and recognition Louise and her eponymous greeting card publishing business has received since it launched, are also some decidedly ‘ungrand’ moments in the company’s development which Lou and Gav are big enough to share. Testament to Louise’s creative talents is the clutch of awards she received even before Louise Tiler Designs was off the 32
PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
drawing board scooping the top award at New Designers in 2011, swiftly followed by an award at Surtex, the US surface pattern show. Buoyed up by these and with an urge to launch her own card company, she booked a stand at PG Live. (Louise’s award success has since continued, having been crowned Most Promising Young Designer or Artists in The Henries in 2017). “I remember her spending a month in virtual solitude, only surfacing when she had created 64 card designs she was happy with
Above: (Left-right) Tache’s Frank Nicholls and Pennie Bryant with Michael Jellie, the head chef at the Business Design Centre (where PG Live takes place) with Louise Tiler Designs’ Louise Tiler and Gavin Nicholas in the kitchen. Left: Some of the current best selling Louise Tiler Designs’ cards. Below left: Louise Tiler and Gavin Nicholas at The Henries 2017 at which Lou won the Most Promising Young Designer or Artist award. Bottom: Louise at work in her studio at the company’s Keighley HQ.
to launch at PG Live,” recalls Gav, Louise’s soulmate of the last 15 years. “She came back from the show in floods of tears, not because she hadn’t received any orders, far from it, but as she had no money to get the cards published to supply the orders she had taken,” Gav reveals, who as he was working as an electrician back then (before he came into the business full-time) was able to help out financially until the business got on a firmer footing. As Louise accepts, “like every startup business we had our teething problems, and at least ours were due to the company growing.” She recalls a memorable evening shortly after the business had received its first export order, to Australia. “I was supposed to meet the family for an early tea at 6pm. They phoned at 6.30 and I said I would be another half an hour. At 9pm they all came to the studio to find me crying into a mass of bubblewrap trying to get the orders out. At that moment we accepted the need to employ someone to help!” admitted Louise. The company now employs six full-time staff, has six outworkers, a full team of agents, sells its cards in 17 different countries and has licensing agreements for