Christmas Gifts at Bluw
Jun 5, 2009 Uncategorized
What will you be giving and getting next December? Our intrepid reporter braves the annual gift fair in Harrowgate for a preview of the gadgets and geegaws heading this way, writes Louise East
THERE IS AN OLD JOKE I particularly like which goes something like this: Darth Vader goes up to Luke Skywalker and says, “Luke, I know what you’re getting for Christmas.” Luke, puzzled and a little exasperated, replies, “But how?” and Darth smugly announces: “I’ve felt your presents.” I’ve always liked knowing what gifts people are getting before they do. Moments before friends hand birthday presents to other friends, I make them tell me what’s inside. If I could hack into online wedding registers, I would. So I was very keen on the idea of visiting a Christmas gift fair, even if it was July.
Trade fairs are where the UK and Ireland’s gift shops buy the stuff we will exchange in December. After going to one, I would be the Darth Vader of the festive season on a massive scale. I’d know what all of you are getting for Christmas.
Home and Gift Harrogate is not the UK’s largest gift fair; that title goes to Birmingham’s Spring Fair, which takes place each February. Instead, the Harrogate fair rather sweetly bills itself as “the industry’s favourite annual show” and amongst exhibitors, there genuinely does seem to be a fondness for the fair, a feeling that while it might miss out on the tiara and sash, it would certainly win a Miss Congeniality award.
To the average punter, Home and Gift Harrogate is still bewilderingly, disorientingly vast: over 900 exhibitors offering hundreds of thousands of products. Amongst them, somewhere, is the gift industry’s Holy Grail: the item which grabs the gift-buying imagination and squeezes it until the euro fly like popped corn.
Last year, that gift was Racing Grannies, a set of two wind-up geriatrics with grim jaws and half-moon glasses who race for the edge of the coffee table on tiny plastic zimmer-frames. They’re the brain child of Bluw, a young self-styled “ideas factory” from London who last year sold half a million sets of Racing Grannies in the UK alone. At the Bluw stand, customer relations manager, Australian Linda Corrie talks me through her company’s response to their Racing Grannies success: Fighting Granddads, Racing Nuns and this year’s invention, the Chicken and Egg. One wind-up takes the shape of a comedy chicken, the other an egg in sneakers; this Christmas, families all over Britain and Ireland can decisively settle which came first.
Elsewhere on the Bluw stand, there’s a plastic taxi meter called Dad’s Cab, which will keep track of all those trips to Dundrum Shopping Centre; tea mugs in the shape of Martini glasses – Ceramic Martini Mug ; Margaret Thatcher nutcrackers – Maggie nutcracker (insert nut between her thighs) and an inflatable duck the size of a cow.
“We only blew up its head because it would be too big for the stand,” says Corrie, looking at the pile of yellow PVC bemusedly. “This country,” she says, “is obsessed with rubber ducks.”
Down the aisle, Grant Watson, taciturn proprietor of House of Puzzles, has also struck gold with his third annual collectors’ edition Christmas jigsaw made of Christmas-shaped pieces – holly, doves, snowmen and a strange cudgel-shaped object intended, I think, to be a cracker. Watson will ship between 15,000 and 20,000 this year. Here among the inflatable goal-posts and animated scenes of Bali (with “real” moving sea) Watson’s jigsaws cut an old-fashioned, even forlorn figure, but he assures me that business is booming. “We’re the biggest manufacturer of jigsaws in the UK. Mind you, there’s only two of us, but still.”
