Posted On: 29/01/2014
By: Scouse Bird
I’ve just come back from a meeting with the inspirational Margaret Aspinall & Sue Roberts over at the Hillsborough Family Support Group to tell them how much we’d raised for them from the sale of the Scouse Bird Diaries. I get sent messages and photos every day from people loving their purchase and honestly it makes me so happy, so I thought I’d give you a behind the scenes look at how they came about.
It was mid-October and I got an e-mail from Ellie Phillips of the Liverpool Music Awards suggesting I do a SBP diary – it was something that had crossed my mind but I didn’t have the first clue as to where to start with it. I arranged a meeting with the two lads who run Cards4Scousers; a fantastic local company who I knew would have experience with printers, but you can read more about their story here
I turned up a good hour or so late to our meeting in Tavern On The Green – I can’t remember why but I’m sure I had a good excuse like getting my hair done or something – and it was like a blind date as neither of us knew what the other looked like. I spotted a couple of fitties at the end of the bar and lo and behold, it was them. Fit, funny and clever; girls, they’re a triple threat.
They plied me with wine after wine after wine despite me protesting that I had the Juice FM style awards the next day and I absolutely could NOT be hungover for them. They didn’t care, the wine kept coming. One of the very first things I mentioned was that I’d like to donate some of the profits to charity, preferably a local one and they whole-heartedly agreed. We had a discussion and decided that as Hillsborough is so close to everyones hearts and brings the city together that they were definitely the ones we wanted. One of the things we were wary of was that we didn’t want people to think that we were using the HFSG donation to sell more diaries as that simply wasn’t the case so we mentioned it at the diary launch and had a page at the back of the diary stating that a proportion of the profits was going to them and left it at that. If people were buying the diary simply because some money was going to charity we’d rather they just donated directly.
I was skeptical as to whether anyone would even want a diary and thought we’d only sell about 100, if that. How wrong I was! Luckily the C4S boys had more confidence than I did and in the end we’ve sold thousands. They’ve been shipped to all corners of the world. My diary has a better life than I do! While it’s winter here, my diary is soaking up the sun in Sydney, loving life in Benidorm, repping in Brooklyn NYC and going to work everyday in Times Square. Mind blowing.
I’ve used a paper diary for years; phone calendars are just no substitute. One of the problems I found on a week to view diary was that Mon-Fri are all spread out and Saturday and Sunday are squashed in at the bottom, but I was always busiest on a Saturday with hair appts etc. So I thought ‘fuck you Mon-Fri’; they all got squashed onto one page so that Saturday could stretch her legs out. Naturally I wanted to remind everyone that every Monday is time to start your diet again, while Wednesday is the time to start tanning for the weekend in order to reach the perfect shade of Blorange (black/orange).
We wanted to organise a Scouse Bird directory as well instead of all useless shit like bank holidays in Hungary that other diaries have, but there wasn’t enough time. We only had a few weeks to get them designed and made in time for Xmas. Plans have already started for the 2015 diary though so it’s going to be bigger and better and seeing as we had so many requests for a wall calendar….we may do one of those too!
I just want to thank the Cards 4 Scousers boys from the very bottom of my heart, there’s no chance I could’ve done this without them. I just told them what I wanted the diary to look like and they went away and sorted the production, printing & distribution all by themselves as well as their own card business AND running a pop up shop in Williamson Square. They’ll deffo want me to point out that there’s only 2 of them as well!
There are, as I speak, still some diaries left to order but genuinely not many. We already did a couple of print runs but we won’t be doing another one so once these have sold that’s it, but if you want one, you can order from here. (Ignore the bit about personalisation, that’s just because the C4S website is set up for cards….which by the way you should check out while you’re there cos they’ve got some boss Valentines day ones)
Thanks everyone again for your support and I’m made up you like the diary!
XOXO
Scouse Bird
