Handmade - so what?

Once a hipster trend, the desire for handmade goods has become thoroughly mainstream. It can be seen from the meteoric rise of Etsy, right through to proliferation of the word ‘artisan’ on products...

GUEST EDIT: JAMES SEATON

We invited James Seaton, co-founder of TOAST, to cast his well trained design eye over our collection and to be our very first guest editor.

Timbuktu & Back

I remember singing a nursery rhyme about Timbuktu when I was in primary school. I can’t remember what it was now – was it ‘from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu’? – but I remember the images clearly. A fabled...

Timbuktu: A wild story of Myth, Renaissance, Rescue & Ruin

‘I don’t care if you’re in Timbuktu,’ we might say. ‘You’ll be here tomorrow or else!’ Or perhaps, ‘He’s flirted with every girl from here to Timbuktu!’ It means something like God Knows Where, or ...

Can 'crafts' really drive serious economic growth?

Yet we would be wrong to think of crafts as a small sector at the fringes of the global economy. Far from it, crafts are in fact the second largest employer in the developing world, and have a prov...

LET'S WORK IT OUT!

As humans, we crave order. For many, productive work provides this structure. The world around us might be chaotic. But with work we can, at least at times, control what we do in a way we are rarel...

The Pin Project Viewed from the Ground: A Guest Blog

The Pin Project is an initiative ISHKAR launched on Kickstarter last year. We raised over £63,000 to provide jewellery training and work for displaced people living in Burkina Faso, Turkey, Jordan ...

The ultimate sacrifice

[replace_with_featured_image] Fig 1. Babur gardens [source unknown] Fig 2. One of the hospital's where Dr Jerry used to work[source unknown] Whenever we tell people we used to live in Afghanis...

Risk: Sliced, Diced and Sprinkled On Top

As wedding season approaches, we have been getting an increasing number of exasperated customers asking when our most popular glasses will be back in stock again. Well, here's the honest answer – w...

Tradition as Radical

At the beginning of this year, Flore and I found ourselves at the world trade fair for homewares, Maison et Objet in Paris. After a morning of walking through the colossal trade halls we were quite...

Lessons from Lebanon

Whilst European leaders complain that Europe is reaching a critical point where it can no longer absorb any more refugees, and concerns over immigration have driven the UK towards an ignominious EU...

Goodbye Peacock House, Hello ISHKAR!

When we set up Peacock House last Christmas, we only intended to sell a handful of cufflinks in order to fund a nice post-Kabul holiday. The response we received was phenomenal, and we sold ten tim...