Christmas soon. yay to everyone!

Well we are that bit closer to the end of the year and more importantly Christmas! Of course this would therefore be a perfect opportunity to do a bit of sell publicity and say if you still need to buy presents then head over to www.leftandright.co.uk/lrstore for ideal clothing in the New Year.

A lot has occurred over the last few days here with many changes to take place in the New Year. We still have a lot lined up for the next 6 months and we’ll be keeping everyone up to date on future events. A new website for our younger audience is being worked on which will hopefully make a difference in many ways.

We hope to continue creating video online to promote the brand so if anyone has any ideas or wants to get involved let us know.

That may be about it for now. We may fit one more blog in before Christmas so speak to you all then.

Oh and it’s cold again which sucks...

You got, that Friday feeling...

Wow for once a Friday that doesn’t feel like it has come around too soon!

Productively, this week has been really good for everyone in the office. Starting with your regular narrator here, the design department continued to create logo work with Shake Dance Crew for two more dance groups. Both had distinct styles, polar-opposites of each in fact, which made for a fun few hours of mock up and research. The end results were liked for both items and will be appearing soon enough on their garments.

As for the dance garments, our printing team headed up by Gem has spent the week going through the first batch of tops with the initial dance logo. The finish is great and we are very pleased with them. Our own logo will appear on the back (somewhere?...) so publicity should be cool.

BREAKING NEWS
A new video of our loveable Brad Hicks surfaced on Youtube. All a bit of fun for all involved but what we didn’t quite expect was the follow up email from Youtube stating the video had been blocked in about 50+ countries!!! Could it be Brads dance skills? Or maybe his frequent need to bare skin to anyone he’s known for more than 10 minutes? No. Unfortunately the truth is far simpler and far less exciting. Two songs which have appeared in the video only for comic timing and in no way were added to promote the brand itself were noticed by a record company and therefore we assume either the audio has been muted in these countries or the whole video has been given the strike out. Fortunately no actions need to be taken and the video should be fine in the UK and US.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYFfHwVuH9w

So we are now one of those outsider brands that have been banned! Good or bad, we’ll run with it for now.

And run with it we shall. Next on the list is new design for clothes so hear more about that next week.

I whip my hair back and forth...
Mark

Brrrrrrrrr!

Friday is blog day here at L&R HQ. So what’s been going on?

Well the biggest news breaker we have would be the sponsoring/partnership of dance group Shake! We are proud to announce we have joined forces with Shake and their multiple dance crews to help promote the varying styles currently circulating!

With this came an enjoyable week of logo design for each crew of which will soon be seen on their gear when performing. We shall keep you informed...

As for our ads in national sports mags, we have sent off the last two to the next Sidewalk issue and Surfers Path so if you are readers of the mags, check them out!

If you are part of the UK (and apparently see the news from as far as the US) then you may have noticed the bit of snow we got recently. To say it’s been cold in the HQ is an understatement (I write this to you all with gloves on!) so while work is important, so is play time. Being the highly creative one (glad you all agree there) I joined the many cold, tired and numb peoples in building a snowman! This particular one is a doorman for us so if your names not down, you’re not coming in!






I guess until the snow/ice lets up the work will continue to be put on the backburner but with things gearing towards Christmas, we hope you all can splash out a little on each other with some L&R clothing at http://www.leftandright.co.uk/

Until next time, enjoy the snow

Mark the creative yet rather cold blogger...

Short and sweet...

So this is a late blog. Or maybe it’s an early one for the week...

Busy could be the word of last week once again. To the point in fact, that I was unable to record last week’s activities. Maybe that is for the best considering this weekend the latest issue of Whitelines arrived on store shelves. Inside we have another ad o check it out if you get the chance. The hooray parade on that piece of news falls short somewhat as the deadline to hand in our last advert for Surfers Path is tomorrow so straight from this you can picture me going mental trying to arrange the last ad for that.

We also completed our charitable task of dropping off £3000 of old stock to the Wessex Autistic Society which was featured in our local news paper, the Daily Echo. We hope everyone there gets some good use out of the clothes.

Another task of mine that was *cough* not quite fully realised, was the next Youtube video. Partly due to lack of musical accompaniment and partly because I’m out of clever ideas with my limited production scale. Anyone who has an idea feel free to put something forward...

I may just leave it at that for now as the next blog will be at the end of the week on Friday. How about I include some behind-the-scenes pics on Friday too...

Have a good week,

Mark

Where did the week go?

What happened? Where did it go? Who am I? Wha... who...
Mental breakdown soon to occur!

Hi all!
Mark again and its Friday thank goodness. I’m pretty sure I somehow witnessed this week without actually being mentally aware of it. For one and all, this is how it's been over the last 5 days at L&R HQ;

The start of the week we were fully aware of a fast approaching deadline. RideBMX mag required our ad for Friday and we had the concept! Just not the pictures... so it was off to the usual haunt to nab a few shots (tricky considering we were low on equipment and hands to help). None-the-less with a little help from our part time photographer who was gracious enough to help (shout out to the Jofo), we pulled through and just before it rained. A lot!

So back in the office by Wednesday and it was time to edit the hot. A process I always enjoy as it allows me to do my thang and pretend to be creative! The hard part this week has been that it’s been a juggle of various projects from many places! So back and forth...

Recently we had a hand with revising the current website. Since then the main priority has been polishing the positives and improving the negatives to hopefully create a friendlier, usable site for you guys out there. Yes that’s right. We at L&R care about our customers!

So now it its Friday and while the shortness of this week’s blog may not suggest a hassle free week it’s the complete opposite (hence the limited time to create a more comprehensive blog). Today staring into the wilderness of html and css space I concur that web design is at its best, an art form that is hard to master and at its worst, a devil on the shoulder of the creative mind where fluid ideas and sketches are replaced with zeros and ones and those funny pointy brackets (>)...

Right now on the cusp of the end of day shut down, I look forward to a weekend of less strenuous activities like dodging the rainy weather and watching as many films as I can possibly take in!

Same time next week. Im gonna go this way... >>>>>>

The beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning...

OK. I’m going to start by introducing myself. I’m Mark and I head up the design department of Left & Right Clothing. This is the most important stage because a) I work in it, b) refer to point a. I joined L&R in late 2008 and we’re now at a stage where we want to turn heads with our products.
This blog has been a little bit light on added value but hopefully that is soon to change. On a weekly basis I’m going to be updating the blog (and News page on our site, www.leftandright.co.uk/News.html) every Friday regardless of whether I actually have anything to say...

So with the start of this week I’m going to break down my activity list! I started with the brief of all briefs; plan my actions for the next 6 months!











From that we’ve been working on a whole host of things. I “Tweet” daily (I’ll never get used to saying that) and have worked on further magazine ads which will be coming out periodically over the next month or so. I’ve liaised with china manufacturers over some skate shoe designs so that‘s a work in progress at the moment. A light bit of research was required for another addition to our growing empire; a new website will be created over the coming months so look out for updates. Oh, AND some amazing business cards! I’m stupidly stoked about these cards. I feel like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman ;)

Overall the basic aim of this as with our brand is to have fun, be creative and push for quality. I hope to achieve this over the coming weeks with my work at L&R as well as on this blog. So feel free to follow, subscribe or whatever else it is people do on blogging sites and come with me on an all-access pass of the behind-the-scenes action here at Left & Right. You’ll see how the company works and grows without a single whiff of pompous, arrogance that you may get from other people in the ‘biz’.

Now where’s that runner with my double mocha cinnamon latte I asked for!...

So we are now live with the store kids! And to push this we needed advertising.
Well, we have cut a deal to have half page ads in some key UK extreme sports mags ergo we needed some ads made. Enter our very own puppet on a string, our dancing monkey if you will...
Some say he is the reason the Mona Lisa smiles and that if you tempt him with a family bucket of chicken, he will back flip the great wall of china... without a run up. We know him as Brad Hicks General Nuisance!!
For the concept of the ad we had a short time frame to work within. Therefore we needed to do a spur-of-the-moment NIGHT SHOOT. Some of the entertaining scenes can be viewed below.
Well at least we got the job done. Eventually...

12/01/2010

It's been a crazy few months here at Left and Right HQ. We have been having technical difficulties with the store so all the stock is currently on Ebay and being sold by our friends over at Tshirtmonkee. We have a long standing relationship with them and we know they will do the brand justice. We currently have a Sale on all the 'Originals'. These are the first 5 of each design in the range and so are extremely rare. These were used as samples in the design process and aren't finish quality, but they are bound to be worth a tidy sum when Left and Right takes over the World!

In the last few months we have also been making waves in the local community. We have great joy in announcing that we have begun a new relationship with a local Sports Hypnotherapist. Greg Smith has been a local sports enthusiast for many years and has now turned his attention to helping those sporty individuals get a head start by getting their head straight!

Through Greg we have managed to acquire a new name for our brand in the motorcross world. More on this soon. (For more info on what Greg does check out our links site)

We also have a few more link ups to come in the next few days so stay tuned for more exciting announcements regarding

Spring/Summer stock - New Sponsors - Forthcoming places to see Left and Right Clothing