Here’s a post for friends and family only.  I put this together for a family portrait I’ve commissioned and thought the pictures worked really well together.

More about the family portrait when it’s completed.  I’m VERY excited though.

I’ve been tagged by Lottie to reveal seven random facts about myself.

1. I’m short.  5’1″ to be precise. Any shorter and I’d need a booster seat. Mostly I don’t mind, though it makes some things difficult – seeing out of car windows (not ideal if you’re driving), reaching things down from supermarket shelves, buying clothes etc. 
2. I have a thing for tall men. The Husband is 6’2″, though the tallest person I’ve been out with was 6′ 4″.  Even I had to laugh when I caught glimpses of us both together in shop windows.
3. Speaking of whom, I met the Husband in the kitchen at his ex-girlfriend’s birthday party.  I passed him a stuffed pancake, looked up into his eyes and knew.  We’ve been together ever since.
4. I can touch my nose with my tongue.  Men seem to find this fact endlessly fascinating.
5. I previously worked in the City, in the strategy department of a huge multinational corporation and as a management consultant before realising that I much prefer cushions and jewellery and pissing about on the Internet. So now I’m poor and er, happy instead of ridiculously wealthy as all my City contemporaries now are.
6. I studied French and Italian at uni and have lived for longish periods of time in the South of France, Switzerland, Milan, Rome, New York and now Seattle.  I’d move to the South of France tomorrow if I could.
7. Several hundred years back in the day I was a semi-finalist in Capital Radio’s London-wide disco-dancing championship and danced in front of a huge crowd onstage at the Lyceum in the Strand.  I could cope with the embarrassment because I’m incredibly short-sighted and used to take my glasses off before going to discos (as clubbing used to be called).  Which led to me entering all sorts of strange dancing competitions and copping off with lots of ugly men. Fortunately I won a number of dance competitions that year and used my winnings to finance my first pair of contact lenses.

Helen, Leela, Pink, Shannon, Abigail, Rebecca and Terramia consider yourselves tagged.

I realise I’ve been so caught up in moving house and thinking about doing it up that it’s been the longest time since I blogged about the business. 

It’s been chugging along quite nicely for the last few months, though not growing as spectacularly as I would have wished, as I just haven’t been able to focus on it as much as I would like.

Hello, my name is Paola, and I’m a magazine addict…

But hopefully things will be changing going forward.  The big news is that last month I let go of our PR company.  We’ve worked with Plum pretty much since mirrormirror was founded and for the first year or so they did a fairly good job for us – getting us coverage in most of the broadsheet newspapers and spots in magazines such as Vogue, Glamour, Marie Claire, Homes & Gardens and InStyle.

But I think they got a bit complacent last autumn and call-ins and coverage started to to dry up.  Unfortunately for them this coincided with me adding a ‘how did you hear about us?’ button to the site which meant that I could finally monitor exactly how much profit was being generated via press mentions.  And it wasn’t enough to justify the high cost of the retainer.

So, from now on, and for pretty much the first time ever, we’re going it alone, which feels rather scary.  We’re in the process of compiling an in-house press list and are going to be developing a journalists’ newsletter and image library. 

The good news is that this has freed up a chunk of change each month to spend on different forms of advertising and marketing and introducing more new products, which will make life much more fun.

If you’re a journalist yourself, or edit or write a fashion or design blog and would like to be added to the email list then please contact me. I promise to send you no more than one email a month (and that’s only if I get myself super organised!)