Wonderful First Advent!

All those who followed the story about the Christmas-preparations… Here is the result:

I hope you like it the way I do

This leads me to wish you a nice, calm and lovely first Advent

Stay all well, Kisses from the Marsu’s!

THANK YOU!

A big, huge, enormous THANK YOU to all the nice allies and confidants, who where so nice to answer the questions we gave them!

As you know from another post in our beginnings, we want our shop to change every 3 month similar to the seasons. We will have a topic for this periods and had a great brainstorming about what they could be. We laughed a lot and had great fun in developing good, interesting headlines for our campaigns. But of course we wanted to double check if they are also interesting for others, so we decided to send them to a few guys out there and see what they will think. At the moment we are evaluating the answers we got to choose our first theme…

You will ask now which topic is it… Well… We won’t lift the secret jet which themes where the most popular, and which theme we will do first, but it will be a fabulous opening next April, we guaranty! Just stay tuned

Thanks once more to all of you out there to take part in our struggles, adventures and breeding!

Have a nice and cosy Advent-Weekend!

Scouting for shop locations – act two

… as long as our feet are carrying us… today we saw a couple of new places and all we want now is a warm bath and tea. But the effort was worth it. We see much clearer now, how much space we will need and how expensive the different streets are. It definitively makes a big difference where your shop is located, how huge the windows are, how the customer is able to enter your shop etc. etc. So many points on our lists which should be fulfilled.

One Shop located in Dunkerstraße is one of our favorites, but no wonder: It´s the expensive one…

Barbara and me immediately saw our bags arranged in the front-room and our desks and working-space in the back. There is also a little tea-kitchen where we could make us some coffee etc.

Please don´t mention the horrific wall decoration, there was an Internet-coffee-shop before… The room-separation is really ideal and we will do some painting before we start of course. We will see how clever we are in dealing with the price.

Let´s keep our fingers crossed, we will let you know what’s going on!

We are all chicks! (Business seminar – Working in a team)

We are chicks! Or better: we all behave like chickens!

We found this out today during one of our two hours business seminars: Felix Berghöfer from Berghöfer Consulting talked to us about setting up a company and working as a team. Due to the fact that he is trained in psychology, he explained to us in a very psychological way how teams or groups work and came up with the chicken theory. More in detail: Mr. Berghöfer spoke about the ‘Pecking order‘ that Mr. Schjelderup-Ebbe developed in 1922 by watching chicken and analyzing their behaviour.

Now let’s have a closer look to the theory: In course of time in every group chicken or people adopt certain roles and act like that. There is one part that acts as the leader of the group: the cock in the chicken group and usually the boss in the human case. We call this one the α (alpha). The one working as supporter, expert, consultant or informal boss is the β (beta). Then we have a group of persons or chickens called the γ1, γ2, γ3… (gamma). These are simple group members, employees who do their work, but they don’t behave conspicuous. An important role in the group plays the ‘ω active’ (omega). This one is opponent to the α and competes against  α by questioning the leaders decisions. He is the barrater (Querulant in German) of the group. The ‘ω active’ can be very important for the group as a critical member that prevents the group from making mistakes. And the last element within the dynamics of our group of chickens is the ω passive: it’s the weakest member of the group, the outcast, the groups punching bag.

And what do Katrin and I learn from all this? We are now sensitized how processes in groups work and how people act and behave. We better know how we personally act in groups and instantly decided that Katrin is more an α and I am more a β chick. That’s probably why we can work together very well. And the seminar raised our awareness for conflicts that can and will occur in our two-person group or with other persons that we might get to know and work with during our business life.

Can you find similarities in your all day business life? What I had fist in mind after hearing from the theory was my old job. I almost instantly identified my ex-bosses and colleagues as α, β or γ chicks. Do you now better understand how your working groups act? I am interested in your opinion.

(photo from http://www.flickr.com, linked to its source)

Scouting for shop locations – act one

Yesterday we started to look for locations for our shop in our preferred Kiez (this is the name for district in Berlin) ‘Prenzlauer Berg‘ near Helmholtzplatz and had a look at our first shop today. Although the shops location isn’t great, we thought to look at it just to get a better feeling for the rents and for our practice in dealing with house-owners and estate agents (which are not always easy to deal with).

And what happened? The shop did even perform worse than we expected. It is located in Prenzlauer Allee that is a really busy street with tramway and a lot of cars. Yes we knew about it before, but there are better places in Prenzlauer Allee as well. First it was the wrong way of the tube station and next is that there are many creepy shops around e.g. very cheap furniture and a mattress outlet and Lidl opposite. That’s not what we are looking for.

And the shop itself? It is still a lamp shop which owners are a 70 years old couple and, believe me, it is furnished like that. Everywhere not the nicest models of lamps you have ever seen. But that won’t be a problem, because everything will be thrown out by end of the year. The room layout is not bad. It has everything what we need: one big room for the shop, a smaller room with daylight for our atelier, a kitchen and a toilet. But the condition of the shop is not the best. Let’s say it’s old and there is a lot of work to do. And the worst is: it’s not even cheap.

Conclusion of the day: No way to take this shop! We can live with everything (except to high rent), but not with a bad location that is really essential for a shop.

Extraordinary, cosy interior knitting

To all knitters out there! Look at these fabulous knitted pouffes! They are so great… great colours, great pattern, great details, great photos! I love them.

They have been designed by a dutch textile designer called Liset van der Scheer, who is working on carpets, bathroom textiles, curtains… all kinds of textiles. And the company that produces them under the name ‘Bonnet’ is Casalis Carpets from Belgium. Their carpets look great as well!

Many thanks to Tessa from Flannel Apparel who wrote about these a few days ago and I found so brilliant that I had to show them to you.

(photos from http://www.casalis.be/ )

My Passion for Green

… is indescribable huge… I like every shade of it and as I had the chance to get this yarn from “Wollmeise” I certainly could NOT resist )

It was the first time for me to do a lace shawl and I was quite nervous how it will look like in the end. I was not really satisfied as I saw this grumpy pile of yarn… Till I found about blocking! Blocking is a method to even and smooth your knitted piece. You water your finished knit-work and stretch it on a soft underground and fix it with rustproof needles. As my shawl was bigger, I tried the wire-blocking method: Get some fibre glass or carbon sticks, as used for kite-building, and pull these thin sticks through the edges of your shawl.

This saved me regarding the loads of needles, which would have been needed to stretch the shawl properly… And what should I say?

I LOVE my shawl, and the yarn is great, the color, the softness and and and… hope you have something cosy like this too!

Exploring Berlins nightlife

Beeing now in Berlin for three weeks I start to feel comforatble in my appartment and I am starting to explore Berlins infinite nightlife. That’s why I am not that active here on the blog.

See here ‘Kim Bar‘, Brunnenstraße 10, U Rosenthaler Platz

I wish you all a nice weekend!

(pic form Barbara Marsupialia)

Bags from Belgium

Thanks to contacts to Belgium I’ve recently got this tip from Steven: Michael Verheyden. He is a fashion and accessories designer from Belgium. And I just found out while reading his biography on his site, that he (about the same age than we are) studied industrial design as well. As Katrin and me did. Amazing! He found is way to fashion by being a model in Paris and started to develop his passion for fashion.

But now let’s look at his work:

In my opinion these bags could fit into our shop as basic products. They are not crazy, not fancy but really solid, well designed bags made of nice lather. What’s your opinion about these bags. Do you like them?

(pics from www.michaelverheyden.be; photographer Arthur Roovers)

Let there be stars for everyone

I´m absolutely desperate on stars for this Christmas, as you may have noticed here. What I found on You-Tube you might find interesting too:

or:

Wouldn’t one of these beauties make a perfect present?

Thank you Karl from origami nut for sharing these great videos!