Mary Portas, Handmade Needs You!

UPDATE: Mary Hears Our Call! read the latest about this campaign HERE

An Open letter to Mary Portas of UK TV Fame: Mary Queen of Shops

Mary, the handmade fashion and accessories industry needs you!

We bring you your biggest challenge yet: Bigger than ‘Under the Moon’, bigger even than ‘Homeboy’.....we bring you the handmade fashion and accessories industry!

With the huge resurgence of handmade over the past few years, many people have rediscovered the joy of hand-making and small handmade businesses have been springing up throughout the UK, resulting in a hidden handmade economy. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream public are still unaware of its existence or the fact that there are abundant opportunities to acquire bespoke, unique, quality hand-crafted goods for high street competitive prices.

Websites such as UK Handmade and Handmade and Fabulous seek to address this by bringing handmade to the fore, providing the general public with a portal through which they can discover handmade alternatives to high street products.

We, the designers and makers of handmade goods, work diligently to make and market our products, but we are on the cusp of a new era and we need your guidance to fully exploit the opportunities that await. We need to truly show the mainstream public that handmade is a viable, affordable choice. This means taking handmade into the high street and you, Mary Portas, are the perfect person to help us do that.

Mary we need your help!

Signed

UK Handmade team & Handmade and Fabulous! team

Letter on UK Handmade Blog

Letter on Handmade & Fabulous Blog

UK Handmade  - info@ukhandmade.co.uk
Handmade and Fabulous!  -  susan@fabulouslyhandmade.co.uk

How Mary can help

Mary Portas is a UK-based retail expert (guru), she works in the fashion industry with big names, helping them to raise their profile and brand themselves. She also has a very successful UK-based TV show, where she helps struggling shops to build their brand and create an attractive and successful business.

Mary has expertise in the areas that many handmade designer/makers focus on namely - fashion, accessories and home-wares not to mention her high profile in the UK. If Mary chooses to champion handmade on the high street it would be a huge step forward in making buying handmade a viable option for the general public.

How you can help

We are asking you our readership, membership and followers to join us in calling for Mary’s help to get handmade fashion and accessories on our high streets. 

Campaign badge: Put a campaign badge on your blog or website by copying and pasting the following code:

<a href="http://www.ukhandmade.co.uk/magazine/handmadeneedsyou" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Handmade Needs You!" src="http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu265/KalaArt/mpbadge.jpg" /></a>

Forum Post: We have started a thread on the forum of Mary Portas' site here:

 http://www.maryportas.com/index.php?option=com_ccboard&view=postlist&forum=8&topic=80&Itemid=67

Please go to this forum post and leave a comment;

Tweet: We would be very grateful if you could twitter about this campaign and use @queenofshops in the tweet so that Mary and her PR team can see it and please set #maryweneedu at the end of your tweet to help it to trend;

Facebook: Add a Facebook link to this page and ask your friends to help;

Blog: about our campaign and ask your blog followers to join in!