happy new year! here’s to a lovely start and we get right into it! the year couldn’t start better really. our last blog post was about our upcoming tv appearance (in which we got the starting date of the series wrong… so sorry about this!) but we can now confirm that zita’s (my) episode airs on monday 9th january at 4:30pm on BBC one!
it is a lovely, feel-good kind of show, and it’s been a great, if busy experience - compared to which the episode felt rather short! of course it’s rather difficult to squeeze two months of intense work into twenty minutes, so i’d like to share more about the work behind the scenes and my designs - mainly about the origins of the architectural, brutalist influences for my geometric prints. unfortunately my design philosophy has been left out of the show completely, even though it is very much at the core of what i do, it is the main driver of why i do it, (and what i really wanted to talk about….) and this also explains the modular nature of the printing blocks of course.
so, if you’re interested in more of this, do have a read through this blog, you’ll find plenty of photos of buildings that constantly catch my eye and influence my prints. i also have a series on my instagram on sundays where i directly show how i take the inspirations from them. being from hungary, i had a very typically continental design education with all the bauhaus worship and all, so i personally never found modernist or brutalist buildings ugly, but i know they are a hard sell (and it became truly evident when i moved to the UK!) so making them beautiful, and making pretty things out of the unloved and the mundane in general has become my obsessive mission which would also explain my material choice in the coarser fabrics and why i want to elevate the utilitarian with the help of pretty prints!
this fabric choice seems to have been the main focus of the show for some reason… but i promise i did find all of the mentoring quite helpful and i received a great deal of help with the numbers and business-like thinking. we also worked together to create three new collections - i would have loved to have watched our progress back! but instead, the show’s focus was quite heavily on the jute… i don’t think it’s very obvious after the episode, so i’d like to quickly point out that the jute is not so much my “main thing” (the jute cushions for instance were shown as i set them up for a clearance sale, not because i insisted on keeping them!) however i will always keep it in my range for the rugs and some of the lamps.
my own followers favoured the jute lampshades in a poll at the time of filming and the jute rugs have been selling well and getting into magazines. with rugs in particular, it was just simply not viable to research and develop a new product in such a short span of time - especially when every other alternative is less sustainable or much more expensive. jute is actually a fantastic and very earth-friendly material that has been used in rug-making for a very long time (why not read my old blog post about its environmental benefits) but it also connects me to scotland’s local history, since i’m based so near dundee (and the rough aesthetics of the cloth matches the raw concrete look i’m going for too.)
but if you aren't a fan, you can rest assured, i do have recycled cotton blends now, and pure linen too for my cushions and kitchen ranges… so it’s all environmentally friendly (which i think should really be much more encouraged on TV in 2023!)
and finally, and somewhat most tragically, due to the economic circumstances, the wonderful business boost surprise also had to be cut out of this episode… for the last day of filming, the producers invited the chief buyer from made.com and i was gifted an amazing opportunity to sell my homewares with them. i was so grateful, i received beautiful, enthusiastic comments on my work and it would have been an absolutely life-changing experience.
i spent the rest of the summer getting my cushions ready for them, but due to financial difficulties, they went into administration just before our launch, ceased trading completely, and the whole thing just disappeared into thin air. it was quite heartbreaking, and of course my own little lost opportunity here was nothing compared to the loss of jobs for 700 really nice people. it’s also a shame that such a great, mid-market company that genuinely embraced modern design is now gone. (you can spot some props i use for my studio shoots, bought from them… i was a genuine fan as well!)
so yeah, it truly was a rollercoaster ride. of course, the short episode had no scope to tell about everything that’s been happening, but it was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. i hear it’s been receiving warm reviews and rather pretty viewing figures so it’s probably worth tuning in and catching up with the entire crew of thirty talented makers and their successful and supportive mentors who do give some useful, practical, insightful advice.
i’m delighted to share the episode with the fantastic emmy palmer, with whom i had a little design conversation last year about her mesmerising, colourful glasswares. she has some next-level talent and a lovely person too, meeting all these people was probably the best part of the whole thing.
watch every weekday from 16:30 and on iplayer until the end of year! also coming to britbox in february.
edit: repeats from october at 19:30 on fridays!
