Borough Market!

Harriette has some pictures to follow but thought I would write a little bit about some of the stuff we chatted about today at Borough market. The Market is really really perfect for the sorts of things we have been thinking about with our ideas so its probably a good idea for us to all get down there at some point and have a wander around (either be prepared to buy food or make sure you eat before its all so yummy!)

We didnt want to talk too much about the over all idea as there was only three of us there so it wouldnt make sense to change too much - but we did have an idea of actually doing a proper market stall, especially if we could set up a temorary one in borough market it would be really really great and could solve alot of the problems we would face with opening a shop - for example we would have no need to promote the shop hugely as we would have a guaranteed constant stream of customers (tourists and market goers alike) who would be passing the stalls/stall. It also seemed to fit that we would be making products reacting to those in borough and turning them on the head - we would be a point of difference within the market and being a temporary stall would have a novelty "buy me" aspect.

We chatted to a stall owner about the possibility of this and he said we would need to find the contact details of the organisers on the website but he seemed to like the idea. We were also thinking that we will have a much better chance of getting a good space (be it in a market or a shop space whichever we decide) if we perhaps give a percentage of our profits to charity - plus it is a good deed :)

We discussed names breifly - we all seemed keen on keeping it very simple -
The Market Project was one...
Or we thought if we are in a place we could use the name of the place and call it The .placename. Market.
ie: The Kings Road Market.
We do need to decide on this ASAP though as then we can set up a simple website and be more of a definate group when applying for spaces...

In terms of our own product ideas we were saying that we need to have something that unifies everyone's work -  we thought it would be good if the way we package and display the work is done so that it does resemble actual meat or veg or bread or whatever but we need to be really creative about making things that are inspired by an initial product and then work out a way to package it
 so it resembles this... So if you wanted to make a set of espresso mugs with chickens on you could package them in an egg box.

We thought it would be really cool to make a collection of tea towels which were simply printed as a slice of meat and hang these like joints of meat. (I quite want to do this!)
We spoke to a really nice man who said he would be able to save us some of the big oyster shells from his fish stall and so we thought it would be really cool to have a fish section and sell/ display smaller items in these (jewelery or fun little objects if anyone has any ideas?)

Some things we picked up on in terms of display which will be good to keep in mind when deciding what to make were:
- Hanging meat on hooks,
- Coloured string which is threaded through the end of salami or cured meats.
-Recycled items such as pallets were used extensively - to make the stalls or for decoration as flower planters
-Olive buckets and ladles
- The meat had really nice stamps on it.
- Wooden crates and wicker baskets
- vacuum packaging
- shell fish on beds of ice
- Metal sticks with paper tags which were stuck into loafs of bread.

There are loads more things we saw but the photos will show it all!

What does everyone think!? Reply in the face book thread with some product ideas so we can get a really good picture of what we think we all want to make or maybe post up some ideas here on the blog if anyone has developed anything yet.