Designed for a Simple Life

The simple life - what is that?

I’ve always been a planner. If I go on holiday, I like a packing list drawn up a week before at the latest. If I throw a party or have people over I need shopping lists, menus, music playlists, invite lists … it’s a pretty big list of lists. So the challenge for me is not throwing a fabulous party, but making it effortless.

The latest party I’m planning is a sale launch party at our Wapping Wharf shop. It might be business, but much of our heart and soul goes into that: many of our customers are friends and the connections we’ve built over the past few years are really important so I’m looking forward to it as much as a social as a work event.

When you want inspiration on effortless multitasking, look to busy mums.

“Grab some pasta, get a bag of salad, open a bottle - people just care about the company.” 

This is my sister’s advice on entertaining and I’m trying to take it to heart. We’ve got several new gourmet food lines in from Nicholas Vahe at the moment so I’ve designed a menu around opening jars and bottles. I can’t say that it’s been completely simple, but the food prep list is considerably shorter than normal.

Below is the first recipe for a simple carrot dip. We’ve designed the menu to be largely plant based for all our Vegan friends - this one, it turns out, is great on toast with some avocado or chickpeas. We’re serving it in filo baskets to make it easy “finger food”, but a crostini would be just as good.

The Fig1 Summer Sale Launch Evening is on 11/7/2018 6-9pm. RSVP by email for places.

Carrot, Cumin and Coriander Dip

Ingredients

500g organic carrots, peeled and cut into rounds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
30ml Olive oil
30ml water
Pinch of salt
Small bunch coriander leaves

Place all the ingredients except the coriander leaf in an oven dish. Mix well and cover with foil. Bake at 180 degrees centigrade for 40 minutes, then uncover, stir, and bake again for a further 40 minutes or until the carrots are starting to soften (they don’t have to be completely soft).

Once cooled, place in a food processor with the coriander leaves and blitz until smooth. Add some extra olive oil, water and salt to adjust the consistency and to taste.

Jobs to Dwell on and Jobs to Speed Up

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is shooting photos for new stock. Choosing and buying stock is fun – we're now good friends with a lot of people from companies we deal with and getting together at trade shows to discuss new ideas and the coming season is great – but once the stock arrives I get my own creative kick by working out the best way to display items; the best story to tell with them. While the business was young and growing, most of this was done in the shop, but over the years much of that has been passed on to the hard working team I have there. My time is now often spent trying to give our online customers the kind of experience we give our shop customers. My home office is always full of stock samples and the kitchen is regularly turned into a photo studio for the day.

Although many suppliers provide stock photos, I love to do our own lifestyle shots. It gives us a chance to take items from different suppliers and put them together and gives us a stock of unique images and ideas for people. I come from a creative family and my Dad is a great photographer, so often helps out. My little sister is an artist - if I can get hold of her, Alice makes the best stylist. For me, running a small business is all about the variety, but this is definitely one job I regret having to rush when we are busy. Producing online content is my chance to communicate with our customers, provide the chat about products our real world customers get, show them ideas we have seen and loved. That's the best bit of running a real world shop, and it is also the best bit of running an online operation.

Below: I have always been a bit of a geek too – my latest fun thing to do is timelapse photography on my phone. Having had an interest in technology since I was young, I am amazed at what powerful little tools we carry around with us all the time now in the form of a mobile phone. High quality cameras, powerful computers connect to the endless knowledge available on the web. They can even speed up time, it seems.

And some of the resulting photographs for our Christmas section: