A Chocolate Hiatus.

When we first did Solid Egg in 2012 as a one-off, inspired by a mate’s casual observation about childhood Easter disappointment, we went from amusing idea to fully-branded, ready-to-roll product in just a few weeks.

A creative project by Leigh and I, it was only ever intended to be for excited friends and a few keen clients and colleagues - the word ‘profit’ wasn’t even in the brief we wrote for ourselves!

But to our surprise, it proved so popular it sold out in a couple of weeks. The next year, encouraged by fans of gluttony we made triple - and sold out again. Then we doubled production again - and sold out once more. We changed the packaging every year, to keep it fresh - and collectible. We did gluten-free, soy-free, nut-free, organic; we did vegan, we did pralines, peanut butter and ethical chocolate, and our packaging was 100% recyclable. As the range, the girth of the eggs and our bellies expanded, word spread, and the eggs kept selling out. Bought by chocolate lovers as far-flung as Japan, LA, New York, Korea, New Zealand and Australia, we had a cracking time hatching as many egg puns as it’s possible to find.

For three months of the year, running Solid Egg is like having a second full-time job - so we stopped calling it a Side Project a long time ago. But as creative projects go, it's been great; providing outlets for flexing some packaging muscle, trying out advertising ideas, getting our marketing heads on for something other than illustration, and talking to keen chocolate fans, connoisseurs and suppliers the world over. But in the last couple of years, we’ve had elements of our hand-drawn logo poached, our advertising copy ‘borrowed’, our authenticity challenged, and had eggs thrown at us on social media by puzzlingly furious trolls questioning our motives and ethics; quite the learning curve - but not what we started Solid Egg for. 

We have a lot on the agenda this year, and we can only give our best to so many things - so, more than the brief spell of trolling or the dubious copying, this was really more about being honest with ourselves around where we want and need to put our energies. So we've parked Solid Egg for 2019. Already we're getting lovely emails and messages across social media expressing disappointment but absolute positivity about the product - so we're not saying 'it's over', more...we shall see.

Over the last 6 years we know we’ve made a lot of people very happy (and possibly a bit fatter), so we want to thank all our eggcited fans, loyal customers and supporters who came back year after year. You made our daft project a lot of fun!

Here's to narrower waistlines,*

Leigh + Sarah x

(*genuinely - we actually do put weight on while we're running the project. We think it's because of the ever-present smell of chocolate...)

'The Original Solid Egg': Since 2012 (and why we do it)

In 2012, a chance comment by a friend (Thanks Emma) triggered an idea: Easter eggs were always hollow, and as a child - as an adult, even - you still hankered after the fantasy that one day you'd pick one up and bite into it to find not more air, but more chocolate. A solid, filled, no-bubbles, not-in-chunks, not-full-of-truffles Solid Chocolate Egg.

So, as with many projects before and since, and knowing very little about Easter egg production, we went ahead and made it a reality. We had a history of creating chocolate products as giveaways, promotion and uprated business cards, so we commissioned 50 eggs from a local chocolatier, designed some robust, no-nonsense packaging and an appropriately working-class blocky logo for them, and sold the lot. To our delight, mates, colleagues and strangers alike thrust money at us in exchange for the childhood fantasy of this non-hollow egg.

We initially gave no thought to doing it again, but six years on, Solid Egg is not so much a product as an annual event. We're quite good at events - Leigh and I were putting on events within the first few weeks of meeting each other - so treating it as such feels more native than 'selling a product'. The planning starts before Christmas and the packaging is designed, the ads are plotted and the eggs made as close as feasibly possible to Easter sales time, in order to keep them as fresh as possible. Then with eggs inside packaging and the web shop stocked, we're off, on around six weeks of mentally and physically challenging work on top of whatever else we're working on in the run up to Easter. The Internet can make selling look easy, but it's bloody hard work bringing a hand-made, personalised product to market and even harder actually persuading people to part with their hard-earned cash.

But, with a cult following worldwide, the eggs sell out every year, and we've sold them as far afield as Manhattan, LA, Canada, Korea, Japan, and all over Europe. Every year we're surprised at their geographical reach. The only thing that's stayed the same since 2012 is the logo; the eggs have increased significantly in weight and quantity, the packaging is re-designed every year, advertising routes and looks change; we've designed our own, bespoke moulds.

We've consistently had the eggs made in the UK, with ingredients chosen for their flavour, ethics and origin. People buy our eggs for far-flung relatives as Easter gifts; as thank yous, as presents for themselves; they hide them from their children, buy them for their children, treat their work colleagues with them and keep them on shelves for months, chipping away at a bit of Easter all year round (their average shelf life is around 16 months).

Of course, what happens when you do something that's popular and appealing? It gets copied. There's a big blog coming up about that happening in a much wider context - copying and imitation has been a growing issue in the last 18 months - but, in the time since we've been doing this, another bloke's come along and set up a company selling what he describes as 'solid chocolate eggs', complete with a logo described, when we sought advice on it, as 'uncomfortably close' (you'll see what I mean if your Googling is terrier-like enough to find it!) His egg is, in reality, an egg shape made up of lots of little bits held together by its plastic packaging - so purely in terms of physics alone, not at all solid.
There's room for all styles of chocolate egg in the world of course, and we even laughed and looked the other way when we realised he'd nicked chunks of our copy too (our assistant wasn't so chill about it, she had to be talked down with a nice cup of hot chocolate) and even kept our heads when we noticed he'd dissed our actual egg on his website. But. As long as we keep reinventing and making our egg better and different every year, we're happy to let him have his corner of the chocolate egg world. We know our market, and we know where the motivation for making it comes from - and it's not from the desire to make a few extra quid on Amazon. (There's also no plastic in our egg. Thanks Blue Planet II!)

The other thing we've always done is made vegan eggs. Way ahead of the massive surge in vegan eating, we knew there was a market for a big greed-based hunk of chocolate for people who happen to avoid dairy, and 'inclusive chocolate' was a thing we both sought out and pursued with our own products. As vegans since the late 90s, it would have been insanity not to. Since then we've made a gluten and nut free one too.

So it's all good, and we're quite proud of keeping this project running for all this time. But people still ask us why we do it, since it's hard work and a risky thing to do - after all, what if you don't sell through? There are only so many chocolate eggs you can eat*. The supermarkets are awash with less costly, pretty, or fancy, or character-led, decorated eggs; vegan eggs are even in Aldi now, and for the amount you spend on one of our eggs, you could go mental in Lidl's Easter aisle and still have change for a treat from the 'Seasonal Clothing Bargains' section.

We've come to think it's because people trust us, and the product, and our reasons for doing it. We're not quietly building up an egg-shaped retirement stash - a nest egg, if you will - but we do make a modest profit which is fed into other projects. We don't claim to make the biggest egg, or the fanciest, or the cheapest - it's what it says on the tin (and yes this year, the eggs are coming to you in tins!) - just a solid block of beautiful-tasting no-nonsense chocolate made with love and care. And heavy enough to break a window, or replace your favourite kettlebell.

You can keep track of this year's Solid Egg on Eggstagram, Twitter (chicks, baby hens innit) and Facebook.

*Theory yet to be tested.

And, you can buy them at solidegg.co.uk

DJ Food In Your Ears, Cocoa Amore In Your Mouth.

It might have become obvious over the past year that Inkymole has been building on its involvement with chocolatier Cocoa Amore, whose shop and all-round hub of chocolate education moved last year into its beautiful new store in ancient Silver Street, in the heart of medieval Leicester (just along from the cathedral where Richard III is buried).

Our role there began with an event we put on - a chocolate-infused Buddy Wakefield show co-organised with Pete, Cocoa Amore’s owner - and has evolved from helping out with a little window decoration and signage here and there to fully immersive Creative Direction. We’re currently enjoying the fulsome challenges of everything to do with getting an exciting new franchise off the ground - branding, consistency, interior decoration, marketing, merchandising, communications…and more. It’s hard work, but we’re loving every part of it.

One of the first things we focused on is the in-store music. It’s well-recognised that music can help enhance the atmosphere of a cafe and store (Cocoa Amore is both) and so as soon as we were given the ‘keys to the shop’ we installed a new amplifier, good speakers and a live music streaming system. Playlists curated by us or by our guest artists is not only streamed live into the shop from our studio, but as Cocoa Amore Radio can be listened to anywhere in the world courtesy of Tune In.

Our first playlist we put together ourselves, but our second has been by our long-term friend and collaborator Strictly Kev aka DJ Food. Pivotal in the founding of groundbreaking record label Ninja Tune in the early 90s, Kev’s worked non-stop as a musician, designer, collector and writer ever since, staying ridiculously busy at the forefront of new music and design for music over a jam-packed two-decade career.

His current playlist takes a sci-fi, cosmic/psychedelic vibe and smushes it into different genre corners, roping in such glittering gems as Radiohead (from the new album), Gaz Coombes, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jane Weaver, Annabel (lee), The Dragons, Lalo Schifrin, Jan Hammer and Vangelis. It strides across decades easily and with audible panache, and has provided the soundtrack to many an overnight session working at the shop. And we’re still not bored of it - in fact, it’s one of my favourite playlists of all time.

Listen in at any time, and feel the cocoa-y feels as you go about your day! (better still, if you’re close enough, get a gingerbread hot chocolate in the shop and listen in the warm chocolatey fug):

Cocoa Amore Radio

You can also listen to more DJ Food music and mixes and/or follow at these online establishments:
Soundcloud.
Bandcamp.
Facebook.
Twitter.
Instagram.

There is plenty more happening at Cocoa Amore to write about, but here are some historic blogs about our work at the shop:

Halloween Windows http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/11/halloween-signwriting-at-cocoa-amore.html

Share Certificates http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/11/i-liked-company-so-much-i-bought-it.html

Christmas Trees http://blog.inkymole.com/2016/02/christmas-trees-at-cocoa-amore.html

Mothers’ Day http://blog.inkymole.com/2016/02/snug-like-two-beans-in-cocoa-pod.html

The Legend That Is Solid Egg http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/03/solid-egg-2015.html

RADIO RADIO!

I'm on BBC Radio Leicester tomorrow talking about my work as an illustrator. From 11.40am I'll be talking with Ady Dayman, and you can listen live here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03lzfqh

or play the show back later on, since it's highly likely you'll have important stuff to do on a Saturday morning!

And then once that's done, we're heading back to Cocoa Amore where we're working for the day, on our Solid Eggs and window painting.

That's all folks!

Snug like two beans in cocoa pod.

I’ve been back at the windows of Cocoa Amore leading up to the great celebration of Saint Valentine; patron saint of affianced couples, guarding against fainting, bee keepers, happy marriages, love, plague, and epilepsy.

I didn’t include any bees or plague as that might have confused the message, but I did keep it simple and bright with an explosion of little none-cutesy hearts bursting from the Cocoa Amore logo, which itself is pretty darned heart-shaped. I made some of the cocoa beans romantic colours too (is purple romantic? Steady…)

Then it was just a case of sprinkling them around the windows to reflect the overall sense of adoration and longing (for chocolate, of course).

cocoa-amore.co.uk

 

Hallowe’en Signwriting at Cocoa Amore.

I went back to Cocoa Amore last week to add the sign writing to his new shop in Silver Street, in the medieval part of Leicester. The job was to paint a permanent logo in the centre of the huge windows, add opening times, a building number and bullet points, and then make a right old Hallowe’en spectacle in the windows - those to last only a few days, to give way not long after to Christmas.

Here’s the shop in all its glory, and how it got there!

Shop pictures courtesy of Andy Baker at The Leicester Mercury.
This was my first experience with proper sign writing materials, and it was a bugger to get used to. I used an ivory enamel to match Pete the owner’s existing colours, and built up layers to make solid letters:

 - never work with children or animals:

Then, the split cocoa pod at the top was added, and a shout line. Kneeling on two bags worth of dried cocoa beans, the crunching and constant chocolate smell made for a bittersweet agony/ecstacy environment (Pete wasn’t shy of keeping the hot chocolate coming either):

A freestyle building number now nestles under the Victorian gold swags:

And then the job was to add some opening hours too:

- remember everything is painted in reverse, on the inside of the glass!

Of course I made sure I was appropriately attired. Yes, yes, overalls - but more importantly the chocolate brown lip colour (mixed from two different shades) and brown and copper eyeshade. (Question: why can’t you get brown mascara anymore eh?)

Once the main sign writing was in, it was all about getting the temporary Hallowe’en painting up for the opening night. On this I could unclench a bit and relax into painting familiar shapes with a series of non-permanent Posca inks applied with a brush - the sign writing took four times as long as the Hallowe’en work, due to the concentration required of an amateur combined with sticky, enamel-based paint!

All was now ready for the pre-Hallowe’en Grand Opening, by invitation only, to the shop which sits just in front of Leicester Cathedral where King Richard. As far as I know, he was invited, but no-one saw him. OR DID THEY...