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J'AIME March 2018

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time job any more.<br />

“We’ve made a couple of drinks trolleys for a nonalcoholic<br />

spirit company called Seedlip. It was about<br />

my third month in and they found me on Etsy. They<br />

were launching in Selfridges in London and wanted<br />

something on-brand to showcase their stuff and do<br />

tastings. I’d never made a trolley before but I went<br />

for it and then made them a second one.<br />

“I didn’t think people would contact me for bigger<br />

stuff, I thought they’d just buy my products, end-of.<br />

But doing something bespoke was really nice to work<br />

on.”<br />

From her initial limited product range, Katie added<br />

new lines - and soon added a new material into the<br />

mix.<br />

“I started doing copper rails and hooks, and then<br />

concrete came into it when I started doing the<br />

copper piece on concrete as a candle holder, which is<br />

now our bestseller,” she says. “I think it was just the<br />

right time for copper, it was just huge in interiors.”<br />

While copper was the start of Katie’s homeware<br />

range, much of her product range is now concrete<br />

accessories such as candle holders, coasters, jewellery<br />

plates, ring cones and pots. And once again, she’s hit<br />

on a huge interiors trend as concrete is the material<br />

ju jour in interior design circles.<br />

“Years ago I saw a concrete candle holder on<br />

Pinterest and thought ‘I need to do that’, just as a<br />

DIY. And that’s kind of taken over now,” says Katie.<br />

“I literally bought a bag of concrete<br />

and got started. My dad is told me<br />

all about the binders you need to<br />

use in concrete and I just started<br />

experimenting. I started off using<br />

tin cans as moulds, pouring the<br />

concrete in and then peeling the<br />

cans off when it’s set. Now I use<br />

all silicone moulds, which I try to<br />

make myself so my designs are<br />

unique.<br />

“There’s so much more you can<br />

do with concrete because copper<br />

is copper. I’m using raw plumbers’<br />

copper pipe, so there’s only so<br />

much you can do with it - people<br />

have been asking for brass and<br />

different colours but I’ve not looked<br />

into spray painting yet so it’s not<br />

easy for me to change the colours<br />

up.<br />

“Concrete is more flexible, I can<br />

print on top of it and I can mix<br />

colours, make bigger and smaller<br />

things; concrete is really taking off now. I still like to<br />

keep elements of the copper in my pieces because<br />

8

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