Small Business Day 2024 – Our Indie Picks!
4th December 2024
With Small Business Saturday just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to celebrate some of our favourite independent businesses we’ve worked with over the years.
Now in its twelfth year in the UK, the campaign has grown significantly year-on-year, encouraging millions to shop small and support independent businesses.
As well as gaining significant media coverage and support from leading political and business figures, posts in support of the campaign reached more than 100 million people, with #SmallBizSatUK and #SmallBusinessSaturday trending in the UK throughout the day. Small Biz Saturday will take place on Saturday 7th December 2024.
Fred Aldous
Fred Aldous ltd began in Manchester in 1886 with a man called Fred who had a bright idea and a cracking beard. Working in a cotton mill he noticed that the cotton was being transported in baskets. This gave him the idea for a business – he would import the cane to make them.
Fred Aldous has grown over the last 128 years but it still does what Fred started – supplying materials to people who make things. It started off with just three products, now it stocks more than 25,000 arts and crafts products and sells to customers all over the world. With its laser cutting studio, Risograph printer and photography studio, Fred Aldous has become a hub where makers and creatives can hire out these spaces to produce their work.
theCOLAB
theCOLAB collaborates with conviction and inventiveness and creates opportunities for artists to use unusual sites as experimental laboratories to realise their most ambitious, far-flung and life-affirming work. Operating beyond the confines of the white cube since 2011, theCOLAB conceives and realises its large scale, long term, complex artistic interventions. By embracing risk, instilling trust and being courageous, theCOLAB’s work changes the way we perceive, experience and understand the interrelation of space, place, concept and sculpture.
Sonia Sabri Company
Through dance and music, Sonia Sabri Company unearth untold stories, transform lives, and create small miracles. The company is one of the leading contemporary South Asian dance and music companies in the UK, and it has an international reputation for presenting Kathak dance in a contemporary context, without diluting its integrity. It creates work relevant to modern audiences, inspired by Eastern and Western cultures and the rich possibilities that arise when they meet.
Teacake
Teacake provides a personalised graphic design service, working in partnership to identify your objectives and create a range of solutions across all media platforms to support the effective communication of your philosophy and core values. They started in 2006 from a love of all things creative, to fulfil their ambition to collaborate with like-minded inspiring and innovative colleagues and whistle while they work every day of the week, Teacake have worked with a range of commercial and cultural organisations from sole traders, small and large businesses, charities and creative entrepreneurs including musicians and a supermodel.
Elnaz Yazdani
Elnaz Yazdani is an embroidery artist and educator based in Yorkshire, dedicated to sharing her textile skills and promoting the importance of embroidery as an art form for the future and for community wellbeing. She has taught embroidery throughout her community, within primary, secondary and higher education as well as community groups and organisations.
Her practice explores ways of transforming traditional embroidery techniques through her choice of unusual materials; she is inspired by industrial, upcycled materials and the ways in which she can embellish, connect or transform these items through stitch to develop a surface or form.
Little Inventors
Little Inventors is a creative education organisation that inspires imagination by taking children’s amazing ideas seriously.
Founded by artist and designer Dominic Wilcox, Little Inventors supports families and educators to bring creativity into the home and the classroom, whilst also inviting professional makers and experts in a wide-range of fields to work with and inspire children. Little Inventors match creative skills development, resilience and confidence building and problem solving with the importance of being a responsible, planet-protecting citizen.
Polonez Manchester
Polish folk ensemble Polonez Manchester perform traditional Polish folk dances in stunning handmade and embroidered costumes from the Lowicz region. With over 75 years of experience and having twice performed for the Royal Family, they are passionate about sharing folk, dance and Polish traditions.
Hot Bed Press
Hot Bed Press is A HOT BED OF ACTIVITY and the place to be for print. From screenprint to etching, relief print to letterpress, they’ve got large well-equipped facilities and the expertise to support you, whether you are new to print, or an experienced printmaker. Set up in 1994 when a small group of printmakers dedicated their time to creating a space for people to print and learn about print, Hot Bed Press has since become a staple to printers in Manchester and beyond.
Talkaoke
Developed by The People Speak, Talkaoke is a pop-up talk show where anyone can sit down and air their views around the table of chat. Talkaoke is a live, television-style talk show and consists of an illuminated round table with a host sitting in the centre. Participants sit around the outside and are passed the microphone whenever they want to talk, coming and going as they please.
Facilitating conversations across the community, Talkaoke is a journey from one unexpected subject to another. It can be topical, funny, deep, out-there, or all of the above.
The Making Rooms
The Making Rooms is a place where creativity, technology and advanced manufacturing come together in a community facility for use by artists, inventors, students, children and just about everyone else to design and make anything from high-tech products and gadgets to toys, artworks, home decorations and accessibility devices.
At the heart of The Making Rooms is a Fab Lab containing an impressive range of modern fabrication equipment combining advanced manufacturing with traditional craft processes including 3D printing, laser cutting, electronics, CNC machining, pottery, sculpture and screen printing, to name but a few.
Learn more about Small Business Saturday here.
