Lifestyle Shopping&Fashion
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BUY THE WAY NEWS FROM THE SHOP FRONT
STUCK IN WORK on a hot day and tempted to crack out the Pimms? While your boss may frown upon drinking on the job, he can’t say nothing about you
eating a cupcake with Pimms icing (pictured). Cuckoo’s Bakery also do Guinness or Mojito specials too, follow them on Twitter for info. 150 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, 0131 556 6224, cuckoosbakery.co.uk, @cuckoosbakery.
NEW SHOPS GALORE in Edinburgh: Coco of Bruntsfield take the artisan chocolate goods downtown, with a brand new branch just opened on
Broughton Street. Look out for their Friday night connoisseur evenings too. Coco on Broughton, 71 Broughton Street, 0131 228 8670, cocochocolate.co.uk
DOWN IN STOCKBRIDGE, VoxBox is a recently opened second-hand record store, selling Françoise Hardy, The Fall, Nico and hunners of obscure disco LPs, last time we went in. VoxBox, 21 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, voxboxmusic.co.uk THERE’S A PLEASING wonkiness to the illustrations of Ewan John (see his corpulent badgers and dapper pigeons at ewanjohn.com), and we like these hand- made ceramic birds of his too. Available from the Shop of Interest, 1058 Argyle Street, Glasgow, 0141 221 7316, theshopofinterest.co.uk. The Shop is also doing 20% off all prints and paintings during August.
ANNIE MO’S IS a small, and ‘proudly offbeat’ Aberdeen- based furniture boutique, with some grand plans. After taking over the old co-op building on Edinburgh’s Great Junction Street earlier this year, they’ve just opened another branch in Dalry plus their first in Glasgow. Annie Mo’s, 8–13 Angle Park Terrace, Edinburgh, 0131 337 9284; 212 Great Western Road, Glasgow, 0141 331 0333. Find them at facebook.com/anniemos.scotland for updates on promotions, events, new products etc.
Light reading
After a brief stint at the Modern Institute, GmbH has found a new shop space in The Lighthouse. Jamie Kenyon and Neil McKie, two friends who run the magazine store together, look back on the story so far
A long time ago . . . Jamie: ‘Neil and I had been friends for a while. We regularly talked, often involving beer, about doing something, or several things – there have always been a lot of ideas floating around, and the publication shop was amongst them. It seemed a pretty good gel of our interests; art, design, photography, publishing, having a shop, and doing it independently. We got distracted for a bit with other projects like a cycling festival and real jobs, but in the end it came about through a conversation with Toby Webster, who owns The Modern Institute gallery. Toby offered us the use of the front space in the gallery and after that it all happened pretty quickly – a month in fact.’
of October 2010 Neil: ‘We called in some favours, did a lot talking, emailing, convincing, and pulled it together in time. We knew from the start we wanted to work with as many different people as possible – that’s what makes it exciting for us. The logo was designed by Scott Myles, and we asked another artist, Giles Round, who Jamie had worked with in the past, to make us some tables. Right at the beginning we had great customers. We were surprised and excited by how well informed people were. We were always getting requests for new stock, often things we hadn’t heard of, which we loved!’
February 2011 Jamie: ‘Our time at the Modern was great. We braved it through a cold Glasgow winter and came out still smiling. The gallery was always a temporary space and we’d really hoped to get a shop unit of our own, but it just didn’t quite 32 THE LIST 21 Jul – 4 Aug 2011
happen that way. We decided to keep the shop running online while we found somewhere. A few months ago we started talking to The Lighthouse. It seemed like the right spot being so central, the perfect place to nip in and pick up a mag.’ July 2011 ‘We’ve spent the last few weeks doing the fun stuff – expanding our stock from publishers around the world, designing furniture and getting people excited about the shop opening again. We employed staff, invested some serious money in furniture that was basically a pile of steel, a couple of drawings and an idea. We are about to have a shop five seconds walk from one of the busiest shopping streets in the UK. It just got a whole lot more serious.’
The future ‘We open the new shop to perfect-bind-busting success. We sell loads of stock and all is well (don’t hold us to this). At present GmbH shop sells publishing – magazines, books, journals, zines, about pretty much every subject (Lula, Acne Paper, The Gentlewoman, Fire & Knives, Grafik, to name a few). For us the shop was just the most immediate and translatable way to present really great things in the city, work with interesting people and produce our own things. Now we have somewhere permanent we’ll hopefully have the chance to do more.’
GmbH opens at The Lighthouse, ground floor, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow on Sat 30 Jul. There will be a launch night on Fri 29 Jul, 5.30-8.30pm. See GmbHshop.com for more info.