heavily branded goods

For this year's little woolly hat project (aka The Big Knit) we thought we'd ask some famous people to design a hat or two for us. We've already shown you some right royal designs you might remember.

Now we give you the above creation by telly's Russell Brand. He sent us the below design based on his own bouffant 'do' and then our expert knitting friends at Rowan yarns have made it into reality for us.

We've also had designs from all of these people aswell amongst others. Let us know whose hat you'd like to see next and we'll post it up...

Fearne Cotton

Denise Van Outen

Chico

Joanna Lumley

JK (Radio 1)

Chris Tarrant

Lil Chris (Rock School)

Jeremy (Arcade Fire drummer)

Kirsten O'Brien (CBBC )

madchester innocent music club at the manchester food and drink festival

Congratulations to Bar Burrito, one of our This Water stockists, who won the award for healthy and sustainable eating at the recent awards.  Fiona, Sarah Jane and I were lucky enough to go to the launch party, where we tried delicious cocktails made from Tuaca Italian liquor. Check out the fancy fruit and veg receptacles.

During the festival I manned a stall at the Chorlton Fringe event, together with some our stockists including Chorlton Wholefoods and the Barbakan. There was beer from Bolton, served by Pi and beautiful home wares for sale from the boys at Pad. This is me with the beautiful Mirabelle, who had her face painted like a cat.

If you look closely you’ll notice the woolly hat on the stand next to the fridge. I was hoping Badly Drawn Boy might pop along as he lives nearby. I met the beanie wearing musician recently after a packed out Manchester gig. What a lovely chap he is. He said he’d design a hat for our Big Knit campaign.

Unfortunately I didn’t see BDB again, but there was a beautiful backdrop of folk music in the form of local lad Aron, aka Petty Thief.
 
Thanks to all those who got involved in the event and helped us raise money for Food 4 Us, part of the WHIZ project that offers a range of activities to young people in a deprived part of South Manchester.
 
By 'our Vic' in the Manchester office (our because she works for us and because she's from 'tup noth). Vic is pictured above with Badly Drawn Boy.

an update on our compostable bottle

This weekend saw a piece in the Independent on Sunday questioning our trial of PLA plastics (our eco bottle) this year.  The thrust of the piece was that PLA is not such a good thing. As you may have read in the blog before, we've now made the decision to move away from PLA and go for 100% recycled plastic across the range. Having looked at all the pros and cons, and talked to industry experts, we think that for our bottles it's better to stick to working with waste material (ie recycled plastic), rather than creating bottles from new materials (even though they are made from renewable resources).

We're always up for a debate and, when it comes to environmental issues, it's usually pretty complicated. Sometimes you try new things out  and you don't get it quite right. It's true that the UK isn't quite ready for PLA. Lots of people don't have compost heaps yet. Councils here are just starting to do more composting. When we launched our PLA bottle WRAP (the government recycling body) said it was ok to have small amounts in with PET recycling, and supported the trial at the levels of PLA we'd use in our trial. But the recycling industry are now reporting that they are finding it hard to cope with PLA. We'd definitely checked about the use of GM corn, and knew there was no possibility of contamination from the plastic, so we opted for a scheme where they offset any GM corn with a tonne of non GM corn. If you are ordering in huge quantities, you can make suppliers change the way they behave and that was our goal in the long term. It was a trial after all, and you can't always go to trial with something that is the perfect version of itself.

All we'd really like to say to you is that we'd like to keep being allowed to try new things out. And when we do, we'd love it if you could tell us whether you think it's the right thing to do. We work hard to make decisions we are all proud of, but together we can do this better.

PS. One last thing. Claire's dad put one of our first ever bottles in his compost and it disappeared just fine. Maybe he's got special manure.

free learning

We know that people sometimes stop by our blog for some business inspiration and an insight into our entrepreneurial world. Well that and trying to win a stack of great CDs by finishing a random sentence.

Anway we thought we'd share some stuff with you that will save you a good few quid on going to expensive conferences. First up is our Rich (above) giving a bit of background on innocent. You may notice that he's got himself a bit out of sync in the video. This happens every now and again especially in Monday morning staff meetings, a good slap on the back normally sorts it out though.

Then the nice people at Thoughtful have been very, well thoughtful and posted up some webcasts from an thought provoking recent conference on business and sustainabilty. It includes some interesting thoughts from our friend Russell (a connoisseur of interesting things) talking about Wattson's and stuff.

Last but not least is another great set of webcasts from Little Big Voice organised by our friends at howies in the summer. Russell turns up again here (he's good at talking) along with our very own Dan.

the power of pink part deux

And so another year has passed, FaceBook reigns supreme and wear it pink returned to innocent once again.

The London office got it's second pink makeover - my my haven't we grown since 52 weeks ago.

Jacob won the Prettiest in Pink prize for the second year running (who would have thought he could have topped last years ensemble?)

Our Scandinavian buddies showed us the latest craze in Swedish head wear & how to pink pout like posh spice .

And the Benelux Boys proved that chickens look good in pink.

And finally here's a note from our Vic oop North "We were all in pink at Evan’s Fishmonger’s in Didsbury, the shop above which you’ll find our Manchester office. Here’s the lovely Fi sampling pink smoothies.

She jumped out of bed this morning, donned her pink dressing gown and came straight to work. Let’s hope she had a wash first. We ran a raffle and raised £50, not bad between the two of us. Tony, the photographer from The South Manchester Reporter popped in too. Watch out for us parading around with a pink salmon in next week’s edition. Thanks to all the Evan’s staff and customers for supporting today, especially Ken who was sporting pink briefs.

Posted by Ginger Sarah.

the best sausages

The boys from Treflach Farm came in yesterday and let us try their sausages.

Delicious. Read more about their story, and rejoice at the fact that they are about to start a delivery service. Mmm, sausages by post.

win some music (and some drinks)

It's Tuesday, it's cold, I've got a cold and we've found some excellent CDs. Would you like to win them? We'll throw in a big box of drinks too.

Simply complete the following sentence and post it as a comment, and we'll pick our favourite:

"Tuesday is clearly better than Wednesday because..."

Good luck.

------- Update ----------

This competition is now closed.

We'll be announcing the winner to our family in our Wednesday 31st newsletter. Thanks for the hundreds of great entries, we never thought that Tuesday being better than Wednesday could be so compellingly justified.

And if you really want to know who won, it was Kevin, who said that "Tuesday is clearly better than Wednesday because...because Arnold told me. And Arnold's never wrong. Except when he confuses the dog with an oven glove...ooohhh."

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cool

The Fonz, Fonzie, Fonzerelli. Now he was cool. So cool in fact that he'd go water skiing in a leather jacket (no handed). We could only ever aspire to be that cool when we were young.

We got a step closer recently though after being named one of the top 500 'Cool Brands' in the UK. Here's our page in the Cool Brands 2007/2008 book.

The awards are judged on innovation, style and desirability. Qualities we try to live by everyday funnily enough.

a thousand words

Air freighting food is a bit dumb. We don't air freight any of our ingredients, and we thought that this illustration, which we came across the other day, explained it better than we ever could.

now available in german

The innocent wee-o-meter has been translated.