Bold Tuesday 2014 recap
It's been a great year for us! We had many bigger and smaller breaks-throughs and we surpassed most of our goals that we had set the year before. It's time to make plans for the next year and a good idea to look back on the highlights of the previous one.
2014 was the breaking point when Bold Tuesday became a full-time job for us. We created our first web page.
We became available in 5 new shops: one in Germany, the second largest bookstore chain in Estonia - Apollo, a nice little shop in Sweden - Pulu, a shop where Estonain Parliament members buy their gifts (seriously) and in the gift shop of Tallinn TV tower. By the end of December our posters were sold altogether in 32 shops.
In April we published the Paper Map poster (was it really in April? Seems like years ago). In May we moved to a new studio, where we work together with young architects.
In the summer we were brainstorming new ideas for posters, hiked around, went sailing and canoeing and came back fresh with new ideas. By August we had dived into developing the new List of Countries poster.
In September we presented our stuff at the Helsinki Design Week Design Market. In October we decided to take two posters - the Estonian "10 Mehetegu" and "Go! Cities" - off production to make room for new ideas. In November it was all about getting ready for Christmas sales and we had our first proper photoshoot with a professional photographer. We applied to a mentoring programme and got accepted, which meant a lot of frantical pitch rehearsing.
December was crazy busy for us - we got so many orders, both from our web and all the shops, most of the month we were just running around between our studio, the post office, shops and suppliers (and still we ran out of stock at the end of almost each week) but it was amazing! We launched our current web page and started blogging. The programme began and we found a mentor.
We got some really interesting coverage in the media (in the picture above you can see the Parliament Santa giving a "Go! World" to one of the right wing Government parties so they can peel open the countries that Estonia has passed in wealth, pitch black irony on their previous election campaigns) and somewhere in the middle of all the chaos we managed to celebrate Christmas.
What was the biggest success of 2014? Probably the decision to commit to the project and do it full-time is the most important one. So far we had seen it as a side project, something to do for fun, but this year it became evident that people really love our posters, buy a lot of them and world wide. It is something we can do for real. The next, slightly more tangible, important changes were moving to the new studio, which gave us a lot more space and allowed to even think about bigger production, and the new web, which made ordering and buying so much easier for our customers.
What will 2015 bring? Next year will hopefully be a year of super-fast development and export, we hope to find many new shops and resellers abroad. Maybe it is too early to say that we want to conquer the world with our posters but in 2015 we want to take some steady steps in that direction.
Have a happy, insipring and adventurous year!
