73 COMPANY PROFILE Have any styles taken you by surprise with their popularity? For many years we resisted selling canes with skull heads, purely because we didn’t like them personally. Eventually the demand for them wore us down and we added some to the range. They sold so well we introduced more, including a skull print folding cane. It’s amazing how much you can like a product once it starts selling, we’re very fond of them now. How do you keep your designs fresh and current? Do you follow trends? Yes, there are fashions in walking sticks as with all accessories, but never so much so as to render the older models obsolete. Currently, designs inspired by British flora and fauna are fashionable, as are our range of canes based on abstract art. We follow womenswear fashions because many sticks are bought as accessories to a new outfit, so we have to be able to match those. Equally, we keep an eye on fashions in other types of giftware – flicking through Gift Focus is brilliant for this! I design many of the patterns we print on our walking sticks myself, which gives the products a unique ‘house style’ and a very British appeal to buyers both here and abroad. What sets you apart from your competitors? We set very high standards of design and manufacture. There may be cheaper sticks on the market but our aim is to ensure there are not better ones for the same prices we charge. As John Ruskin said, “There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.” We do not sell cheap, poor quality sticks because we think it isn’t really fair on anyone but particularly not on people with modest budgets who buy them only to have them fail to last and have to replace them. That is much more expensive than buying a good one in the first place and much worse for the planet too. Also, our employees have mostly been with us for many years, even decades, so the wealth of experience our small
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