Leather paradise

Yesterday we felt like being in heaven: we visited a leather wholesaler named Fauck. We met there Trixi Fauck, who is managing the company, that her grandfather founded about 65 years ago, together with her father. At first we had the chance to rummage in their samples and stock and let’s say were totally overwhelmed by the variety of qualities, colours and finishings. It’s like being in a huge fabric store, but there are all different kinds of leather instead of fabrics. I suppose all the crafters out there know what I mean . And we learned a lot about different leathers: How to distinguish lamb from goat leather. How skate leather is treated. All in all a very interesting and creative visit at Fauck!

See here a few very fantastic examples:

Leather with laser cut outs, combined with textile.

Black Leather with laser cut outs (black) and red leather punched with a special surface treatment (glossy square pattern).

Skate leather in different colours (look at the texture! It’s fantastic).

Very laborious leather punched and combined with textile.

Shark leather. Can you see the animal?

After rummaging in the stock and learning a lot about leather we had a nice talk with Trix herself about our shop, her own bag collection and how we could work together.

(pics from Marsupialia)

May I introduce you to…

…the winners of the first step of the Business-Plan-Contest in Berlin and Brandenburg. We saw them live yesterday on stage during the ceremony night in Potsdam.

There are two categories within the BPW (Business-Plan-Wettbewerb): the category technology for all the future enterprises, working on technical subjects, and the category service for all those who work in the service sector, gastronomy or retail (as we do) and many other business ideas. In each category the top five business plans get a prize. And believe me it’s quite hard work to do a good business plan! I take my hat off to the 10 best of 588 enteredbusiness plans!

The winners in the service category are:

Höfische Festspiele Potsdam GmbH:

The founders Kaspar von Erffa and Dr. Christina Siegfried want to establish a cultural summer festival in Sansousi castle and gardens in Potsdam.

Niche Art and Architecture Tours Berlin:

Three young girls in our age, Katharina Beckmann, Stefanie Gerke und Nora-Nele Heinevetter, want to offer guided tours for Berlin visitors and inhabitants far away from conventional paths e.g. alternative galleries and creative and innovative architecture.

NOK´CHA Tea Lounge & Gallery:

NOK’CHA is a modern green tea house in lounge style combined with a gallery for contemporary Korean art.  They offer very special food and drinks with green tea. Have you ever heard of green tea coffee and green tea muffins? I am very curious about that.

Sanctus GmbH:

Sanctus is a nursing service specialized in home care of people suffering from cancer.

Viswapi:

A group of four young people, Björn Maurer, Norbert Giese, Michael Preißel and Carolin Embscher, are developing an innovative Internet platform where users can swap products. Users as well as products are presented by videos that the users produce to present themselves and their products.

The winners in the technology category are:

autoaid

A web-based diagnostic system to facilitate car repair focused on car repair shops.

barcoo

An application for standard mobile phones with camera. With the free application clients can scan a product’s bar-code with their mobile phone and get independent information (like price, user ratings or location of the nearest dealer) about the product directly to their mobile phone.

Loka

Loka is a map based event guide for Internet or mobile phones. It searches for cultural events near the customers location and shows him exactly where it is.

parelectrics:

A new method for diagnostics of skin cancer.

signavio

Optimization of structures and processes within big enterprises or institutions with the aid of a web-based software solution.

To all the winners: Congratulations! We all keep our fingers crossed and wish you good luck!

To all the readers: I hope you all enjoyed reading about enthusiastic entrepreneurs and brand new or soon to be enterprises.

BPW – night of the proms

Yesterday evening the marsus went to the first award show of the “Business-Plan-Wettbewerb Berlin-Brandenburg”. The location was huge: Metropolis Hall in Potsdam/Babelsberg.  There were 600 people to see the winners!

We tried to look as famous as we could

No, just kidding- we weren’t the proms that night, we didn’t win anything. But to follow the olympic thought: To participate is far more than to win. The Business ideas from the 10 award winners sounded very promising and we are curious, how they develop their business in the future.

Verdam… Can´t find the list with the names and online presence of them, will post them, when I’ve found them.

Marsupialias Bodyguards

Don´t mess with us, or we will send you our two new companions. Our friend Betty made them for us. Maybe she is a bit worried about us two Bavarians living in the big, dirty city Berlin? Well those guys will protect us for sure. Betty creates a lot of those sweeties as you can see and buy here. Maybe you find a personal bodyguard as well?

Ours call themselves: L and M. Look in their faces and you can feel a chill of fear on you skin. And picture this: We didn´t inform them early enough about a planed visit by our friend, Mr. Snuggles! O, o, o! Look what “L” did to him

But at least we convinced them to free him again, and had a nice coffee and cheesecake together… Hope Mr. Snuggles will go on stopping by at the “Beuteltiere”!

We did it and nearly made it!

First: We now have our DaWanda-shop on line now, finally! Who is interested in nice, cute, decorative stuff: Take a look here. Barbara made a beautiful origami-crane decoration-chain.

And me: 5 little easter-eggs, waiting for their easter-bunny to be distributed to your beloved.

Hope you enjoy them, as much as we do. Our hearts will be bleeding giving them away. The only comfort we have: Their new owners will treat them as good, as we do

Trademark rights – and how to get them

While Barbara is checking out the Marken- und Patentamt here in Berlin, it’s up to me to write a post about our aim for a “Beuteltiere”-Trademark. As you will agree with me a product gets it´s name and “face” not until its branded. The brand and logo stands for quality, innovation and for tradition. As bigger the brand as bigger the security of growth, and success.

(pic from Dimitri Bondarenko; Design-Literatur blog)

What does a branding include? Well, nearly everything: form, color, sound, 3-dimensional forms, jingles, even moves can be part of a branding. But first we have to look in the archives of the DMPA if there are any older trademark rights we have to consider. We can register our trademark in different classes of product branches; retail (off and on line) or bag- and leather-goods per example.  So if somebody else has rights for “Beuteltiere” in a different class, let’s say: cosmetics, they don’t interfere and we can register “Beuteltiere” as our trademark. I’m so excited! Waiting at the phone, hoping Barbara is calling soon to tell me: Yes we can!!!

Do you know what real love is?

Today I want to share a very special blog with you: Le Love. It’s a blog ” dedicated to romantic, sweet, lovey dovey, sexy and heart fluttering images. ♥ ” (quoted by Le Love (Unfortunately I couldn’t find the author’s name. Let’s call him or her Le Love.)).

The blog shows us all kinds of snogging couples and love messages.

Katrin’s comment about this blog was: “Ohhhh, they are so cute!!” My comment on this  is: “Yes they are cute, but this ideal world shown in the blog is getting on my nerves sometimes!!” Hmm… probably I need someone who sends me love messages like these as well…

… waiting for sun, spring fever and butterflies to come.

PS: There are some more ‘Le’-blogs: LeFashion with fashion pictures and LeSmoking with smoking videos.

(Pictures from Le Love)

Adventures on our Trip…

You heard earlier, that my mum is a ceramic artist. As we had an business appointment nearby, we stayed at my parents overnight and combined work with fun. Easter isn´t that far anymore, so we decided to paint a few eggs. But not those from the chicks,with good cause we had more resistant ones (Barbara is such a scatterbrain sometime ). No, just kidding of course. Ours were cast ceramic ones, you see them “raw” down here:

We had lots of colors, which could also be mixed with each other:

And these are a few outcomes:

Once the eggs are baked in the oven, the colors will melt like glass and turn brighter and clearer. Ohh, can´t wait to see them finished!

Marsus are travelling…

… not around the world, but to Frankfurt doing business stuff. So boring, we can´t even take a picture

But we will see us tomorrow with new adventures and hot stories.

Big Hugs from

Katrin and Barbara

Welcome our second new roommate!

As posted before here we have Miss Molly as a new roommate. Now lady Longlulatsch moved in too.

She just came back from an exciting sailing trip and is happy to have found accommodation in our home now. She told us, that it was quite windy out on the sea, so her ears heart a little at the moment… I don´t know why, but I think she tells us that story to find an explanation, why she never hears our dish-washing demands… Well we will have to organize a roommate-meeting to this topic. Anyway, the two cozies fit together like glue and you are not really able to separate them.

They cheer us up in our grey working-everyday-tasks and to see them chatting in the pillows of our sofa, trying not to disturb us, is soooo sweet.