COUNTERPOINT

street food / internships / housing co-ops / mapping scottish manufacturing / tech incubators

@_counterpoint #7

makethings

Counterpoint is an online publication featuring thoughtful

journalism, photography and illustration.

Counterpoint is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The theme ofour seventh issue is

Make Things.

We wanted to explore the DIY ideal,so we spoke to the founders of

social enterprises, housing co-opsand street food businesses to find out

the secrets of their success.

CONTENTS

4 Salad days

8 Mapping manufacturing

10 Creating communities

14 Happy to co-operate

16 Sabrina and the internship

Cover, insert and back pages: Ross Fraser McLean / Make Works 3

CONTACT

counterpointeditor@gmail.com

@_counterpoint

counterpointjournal.co.uk

Street food and social enterprise in Edinburgh and London

Counterpoint speaks to the founder of factory-finders Make Works

A look at efforts to replicate the Californian tech boom in Scotland

An wee chat with the founder of the UK’s first student housing co-op

Are the employment pressures facing young people damaging creative output?

saladdays

We spoke to a serial salad entrepreneur about the pressures, pitfalls and positives of building a business around your passions.

Words: Sam BradleyPictures: Bethany Thompson

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From the seafood joints lining the locks of Leith to street food sold from the brightly painted police boxes of the Old Town, Edinburgh is a city well catered for. Scotland’s capital boasts mosque kitchens, artisan burger bars and the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK outside of London – but for Joy Rose, neither love nor money could get her a decent salad.

So Joy, a 26-year old graduate from the University of Edinburgh, decided to make her own. After a successful crowdfunding campaign she started Bloombox, a high-end homemade salad delivery business.

One year later, she’s preparing to repeat the trick with a new venture, this time in London. I spoke to Joy to find out what she learnt from her first start-up and how she’s planning to implement those lessons in her new business.

Speaking on the phone from her new place in London, she said “I love wholesome food, cycling, being in the outdoors, talking to people and connecting people with where their food comes from. I’ve always wanted to somehow weave these things together into a project; it was something in which all of my interests concerning sustainability and good food came together. I saw a gap in the market in Edinburgh – there are other sustainable food businesses but it’s hard to get a decent salad.”

Bloombox’s salads were organic, seasonal and locally sourced. In summer, salad lovers could grab a box of kale, gem lettuce, rocket, dill, lemon verbena,

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broad beans and strawberries; or spinach, beetroot, coconut, nasturtium, marigold and tahini-honey-mustard dressing. In autumn, the menu changed to include massaged kale, millet, quick pickled cucumber, apples, elderberries, sesame & coriander seeds, cornflower and cider vinegar pickled dressing. In winter, she sold homemade energy bars; apricot and fig; dark chocolate and sea salt; lavender and beetroot. All the ingredients were bought from local farmers in East Lothian or foraged by Joy herself, sometimes from her back garden (dry ingredients were sourced from wholefood suppliers such as the Greencity Wholefoods Co-op).

Before Bloombox was six months old, the seeds for Joy’s next project had been sewn. Her new business – called David & Joy – is a collaboration with Salad Pride blogger David Bez. The partnership, which was launched recently, arose when Bez got in touch during the Bloombox crowdfunder.

Once her plans became London-bound, Joy said that she treated Bloombox like an extended testing phase. She said that, “Looking back, I guess Bloombox was a pilot for the new business. It’ll be more streamlined, more focused. The main difference is that, with Bloombox, I was relying on spontaneous sales, so I didn’t know how many sales I’d make on any given day. This time we’re setting up an online delivery model, so everything will be paid up already and we’ll know how many orders we have to make.”

David & Joy won’t be as community focused as Bloombox was - something

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Joy says was an example of trying to run before she could walk. In Edinburgh, she ran outreach activities in local schools. “I got involved with a few primary schools in the area and went to them to teach them how to make salads – about where the food was coming from, how to massage kale and make delicious dressing, that sort of stuff. The feedback you get from five year olds is amazing – seeing them learn about vegetables and loving the food. “With the new business, I’d still like to do social enterprise activities. I’d like to make the food we sell more accessible to people on lower incomes; it’s a high quality product and we use high quality ingredients, so it’s perhaps not as accessible as I’d like it to be. But this time we need to get the business up and running, get to the point where it pays for itself and can stand alone, before we start doing more things that tackle food poverty and get this fresh healthy food to the poor as well as the rich, and that might take a couple of years.”

She won’t be able to forage for ingredients in the capital, either. She said, “I’ve tried going foraging in London, but it doesn’t feel as clean as Edinburgh – you can just sense the high levels of pollution and concentration of people using the green spaces so the plants don’t feel as untouched or fresh. It’s nothing like being able to cycle out to East Lothian.”

I asked Joy whether she had any advice for would-be entrepreneurs. She told me, “Basically, just do it.” For first-time start-ups, she recommended

crowdfunding as a way of getting the capital needed to get an idea off the ground.

“The crowdfunder was a great process – it was amazing, being able to build a brand through crowdfunding and at the same time get feedback from your audience. It’s a really good way of engaging with your audience – people follow the crowdfunder until the end to see if you make the target amount, and you get the chance to tell your story through a short video in the early stages of a business.”

For Joy, Bloombox didn’t seem like a realistic project until she began working out potential costings. “When I actually sat down and did the maths and I began to see that it was viable, that was a turning point,” she said. “If you find a really interesting idea then write it down and take a step back from it for a while. When you come back, if you still find it interesting then go away and do the research, do the maths – see if it’s viable. Then you need to go from talking about it do doing it; even if it’s just sampling your idea on a small scale so that you can start to see if it is working and getting feedback from your target audience.

“You learn so much more on the job, about what works and what doesn’t work, about things you might want to change, than you ever would just sitting at home behind your computer with a business plan.”

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Make Works is a digital directory of local factories and fabricators which allows creative professionals – architects, designers or artists – to make connections with specialist suppliers.

Founder Fi Scott began Make Works whilst studying product design at Glasgow School of Art. Frustrated by the difficulty in finding local suppliers for her work, she began a project to map Scotland’s manufacturing base – from industrial estates on the outskirts of the Central belt to far-flung factories in the Highlands - and then her project became a business.

We spoke to Scott to find out a little more about Make Works.

thefactoryfindersInterview: Sam BradleyPhoto: Ross Fraser McLean/Make Works

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Counterpoint: In your own words, what is the Make Works mission?

Fi Scott: So, we really want to make local, micro manufacturing as accessible as possible in Scotland. Part of that is getting people to know that all these small factories exist - and part of it is in inspiring people about why they would want to support that kind of making, or build relationships into the manufacturing industry - when it can feel so intimidating. I feel like we are getting it right when I see new designers going and working with local fabricators, rather than getting their work shipped back from on the other side of the world.

CP: What has Make Works done to challenge negative perceptions of local manufacturing – and have attitudes improved?

FS: I think we hit it a lot more at the beginning, because it wasn’t such a well understood ideology or movement a few years ago. Now, it is much easier, because even many of the big brands are interested in pushing the ideas of products that are small, and locally-made. You see the word ‘crafted’ or ‘made’ on nearly every second shop window now! Some of that is faux-locally made for marketing purposes - but the awareness and more of a demand to find local manufacturers has definitely grown.

CP: What feedback have you had from factories that’ve been listed on Make Works - and what kind of feedback have you had from creatives?

FS: It’s a bit of both. Creatives find it useful I think, and more than anything they use it for browsing and getting inspired that these people and factories are all still there - so it can inspire new projects. The fabricators appreciate the film, photography and web presence - but I love it the most when they tell me about new projects they have had in - supporting that is one of our aims.

CP: What’s next for Make Works?

FS: We have a few goals this year. The first, is that we need to get through our waiting list of factories wanting to be listed on the site. There are so many incredible fabricators that we have found, and it’s a case of going to visit each and every one! We also have a bunch of new things to add to the site, like reviewing factories, and improving things like the search functionality.

The other big thing is making sure that the business model is self-sustaining. The project funding will run out at the end of this year, so we are about to begin testing revenue streams. I am really determined that we will do that in a way that means keeping the platform free to access, and free to be listed on - so we are looking at other streams around that to support it. We are also a non-profit, which is slightly less heard of in the tech-startup world.

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creatingcommunities

Can Edinburgh capture the pioneering spirit of Silicon Valley?

Words: Riley KaminerPhoto: Sam Bradley

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What do Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit have in common? Certainly, they are all tech companies, each with millions of regular users. Look under the surface, though, and you’ll find that their beginnings were all equally humble, as modest start-ups. In fact, they all happened to have begun in the same tech incubator, Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley, California.

The idea of incubators is not a very new one. They have existed since the tech boom of the 1990s, and have been propagated by a somewhat rosy depiction of start-ups in California’s Silicon Valley. Incubators aim to create communities centred on like-minded movers and shakers in the tech industry that foster growth in a way that is faster, they allege, than would be possible otherwise. Their proponents believe that they are places where ideas gain monetary value in an atmosphere where a smorgasbord of breakfast cereals is freely available and where employees have an ability to wear flip-flops while still keeping their pay checks.

Yet despite the fact that every incubator has a different ethos, methodology and set of accepted practices that combine to create successful businesses, they mostly follow a twofold approach: giving a promising start-up funding (in exchange for equity in the business) while also providing advice and office space to these budding entrepreneurs.

This model has worked spectacularly well in places such as Silicon Valley, where a hotbed of angel investors and venture capitalists have fostered the impression that the gushing flow of tech start-up cash will never end. Major world cities like New York and London have also seen a great amount of success in this sphere, as start-ups there take advantage of the high density of millionaires and billionaires looking for ways to invest their assets.

However, the incubator idea has not caught on worldwide by any stretch of the imagination. Lucy Stewart, an Edinburgh-based entrepreneur currently working on a variety of projects, including Sphere, a technology start-up for big data, alleged that “the scale is different” in Scotland versus California. She noted the presence of TechCube and CodeBase, two tech incubators located in Edinburgh, as having a positive influence on the city’s start-up sphere, because “when the going gets tough, you want a community behind you.”

Incubators aim to create communities centred on like-minded movers and shakers in the tech

industry

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Codebase

Europe’s largest and fastest-growing tech incubator. Located in Edinburgh’s West Port, it houses over sixty tech and digital companies, from fresh start-ups to fast-growing businesses. Codebase is funded entirely by private equity, and its mission is to “build and grow the next great tech companies.”

As well as offering custom-built offices in a quarter of a million square foot building, Codebase hosts regular events for the Scottish digital business community and their tenants include Film Hub Scotland, Make Works and

Digital Six. They recently announced a new £1 million fund for start-ups who are interested in digital media innovation, in partnership with Innovate UK, Creative Edinburgh and Festivals Edinburgh.

Techbase

Owned and leased by the City of Edinburgh Council, Abbeymount Techbase offers 17 units for small commercial enterprises. Housed in a converted 19th century school, Techbase sits at the top of Easter Road, providing access to both Leith and the core of Edinburgh’s commercial districts.

Edinburgh’s incubators

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Kevin Harris, a fourth year student at the University of Edinburgh who has worked both in the tech communities of Edinburgh as well as Silicon Valley, cited the lack of a culture of funding as an even bigger threat to tech growth in the city. “You don’t really see the kind of money or investors here that Silicon Valley has,” he asserted, “even though there is some great talent here, especially through the University’s excellent informatics department.”

For the tried and tested tech start-up incubator model, it seems as though there is a necessity for both a community of likeminded, aspirational entrepreneurs as well as an appetite within the greater market to want to fund these endeavours.

Cities with lots of keen funders have seen tech communities sprout up as creatives follow the money. However, it

remains to be seen whether the tech communities that exist today, such as in Edinburgh, can grow without this culture of constant capital available for start-ups. Harris noted the emergence of Skyscanner, one of Edinburgh’s largest tech start-ups, as a great opportunity for the general community with regards to funding, especially if they were to have a successful Initial Public Offering sometime down the line.

Stewart agreed, saying that Skyscanner has “created a really positive work culture” in Edinburgh and has already “given back to the community.” She also noted the fortunes of FanDuel, a successful start-up with a large presence in Edinburgh, as a potential model to take note of, considering the venture capital funding it has received from a private corporation, Pentech Ventures, as well as from Scottish Enterprise, a publicly funded institution.

Despite the successes of firms such as Skyscanner and FanDuel, cities such as Edinburgh have a way to go in order to gain prominence as tech capitals. Nevertheless, having a community of people with aspirations of start-up success certainly improves the collective talent of professionals in a field – now it is just a matter of garnering interest in them.

Cities with lots of keen funders have seen tech communities sprout up as creatives follow the money

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In 2014, Mike Shaw founded the UK’s first student housing cooperative in the heart of Edinburgh.

As members, tenants are all shareholders in the co-op and each pitch in with maintenance and upkeep of the building, located in Bruntsfield. Decisions about everything from whether to paint a wall yellow to the overall direction of the co-op are made democratically. Shaw says it’s a “business with a different way of doing business.”

Counterpoint spoke to Mike to find out more about life in the co-op, the wider cooperative movement in the UK and his plans for the future.

happytoco-operateInterview: Sam BradleyPhoto: Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op

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Counterpoint: Where did the idea for the housing co-op come from?

Mike Shaw: It must have lurking at the back of my head, before spewing out over a cup of tea at some point. But at some point we just decided to commit to making it happen.

CP: Do you see the Edinburgh housing co-op as part of the wider co-operative movement?

MS: Absolutely. We were a founding member of Students for Cooperation, a federation of all sorts of student co-ops across Britain. Through SfC we have been able to tap into the knowledge and co-op networks that we’ve needed to succeed where previous attempts had failed. Since the financial crisis has been a rapid growth in co-operatives, and this is slowly beginning to shake up the pre-existing movement and inject it with a new lease of life. We have also helped found a European network of young people in co-ops. In terms of student co-ops, we are in the process of securing sizeable initial investment to purchase properties across the UK, to form a growing and financially sustainable network of student housing co-ops.

CP: What kind of feedback have you had from tenants?

MS: We have had over 230 applications this year for only 45 places. This is incredibly exciting, but it has also been frustrating to have to turn away so many people attracted by co-operative organising. Many members were initially attracted by our cheaper rent - £305 a month including all bills - but on moving on are desperate not to return to the private market, to no longer be part of such a strong community. Its about knowing the people in your stairwell, having ownership over your home, being able to paint your walls, to

have pets, having no landlord breathing down your neck, being able to easily crowd source advice and seek help from 105 of your neighbours, learning how to fix cookers, organising jamming sessions and film nights, getting money for a project for the co-op that you’re keen on, or simply sharing meals and food.

CP: What’s next for the housing co-op?

MS: We’re slowly making progress transforming our two basement car parks into large communal spaces. It’s costing us a lot of cash, but will provide some fantastic spaces for hosting and supporting events for the wider community and like-minded groups. Hundreds of people have already attended events in the co-op - parties, band nights, talks, mass cooking - and learnt about what it means to organise co-operatively. A group of us are also trying to use our new found expertise to set up new housing co-ops in Edinburgh for students and non-students.

CP: Can you remember the point at which you realised the project was viable?

MS: We’d been doing lots of research, talking to people, trying to find properties, but it felt like we were making no progress. Then the City Council got in touch saying that they think they’d found a property. So several days before Xmas 2013 two of us had a very rushed but exciting meeting with the Managing Director of a local housing association. They had a property, but with 100+ beds they’d concluded it was probably too big for us. We thought it was perfect. A few scribbled calculations showed the finances should work as well. That was a fantastically daunting feeling as everything began to haphazardly fall in place.

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Sabrinaand the

internship

There aren’t enough gigs in the creative economy to go around - and in the arms race to become employable, we’ve lost respect for the amateurs, says Sean Douglass.

Words: Sean DouglassPictures: Alice Carnegie

“I need experience to get the job but I need the job to get experience.”

Those are the words of Sabrina Spellman, teenage witch. Caught in a Catch-22 situation, she bemoans the difficulties of breaking into a cool, well paid and high profile job. At this stage in her life, Sabrina has just started working in a coffee shop after recently starting on a degree course. Despite clear creative talents, such as turning her arch-nemesis Libby into both a pineapple and a goat, she has struggled to find the glamourous, creative role she craves so badly.

Now imagine that you didn’t even have magical witch powers – and consider the hoops young people today have to jump through to get a job in the creative industries.

In 2015, opportunities in the creative industries are arguably greater now than they have ever been and yet at the same time, it would appear that the competition is outstripping this growth; 40% of all positions in creative industries are freelance, compared with 12% for the economy as a whole according to a report from The Creative Society.

In other words, you can’t always expect a secure future if you’re looking to do something a little bit different. The level of competition can mean that it is easier for employers to keep people freelance and hungry rather than it is to give them a staff job. Young people nowadays are under more pressure than ever to build their own ‘brand’ around themselves. That’s fine if you’re Beyoncé but for most people, that requires a lot of hours

and effort for no guarantee of reward.Adverts for the likes of Sky Academy flash up on TV offering youngsters visions of working in television, sport or culture. It is fantastic that these opportunities are available but as with anything, there are only so many places to go around, again meaning that kids have to grow up quicker. The pressure to evolve and become ever-more ‘professional’ is incredible.

The problem with young people aiming to become more and more professional is that it, ironically enough, can actually stifle creativity. Former England cricketer, and now journalist and author, Ed Smith argues in his book What Sport Tells Us About Life that inexperience can help creativity and boost performance while experience brings with it over-analysis, stunting originality.

Smith goes on to suggest that early in his career, the addition of ‘proper’ coaching left him feeling pressured and intimidated, as if the tried-and-trusted methods that got him to that point were no longer good enough. Sometimes though, a bit of freedom or, for those used to corporate-speak, ‘outside the box thinking’ is what is called for.

Amateurism is looked upon as a dirty word in modern society. One of the dictionary definitions of an amateur is “a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid basis”. Realistically, this is how anyone starts anything: someone wants to try something, see if they enjoy it and just do it for the fun of it.The odds of becoming the next Eddie Van Halen the first time you ever pick

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up a guitar are pretty slim. Rather than acknowledging this though, our society wants young people to be ready to go the second they enter the workplace, valuing functionality at a premium.

They’re called creative industries – if you take a systematic approach and try and shoehorn people to do things a particular way, well, what’s the point? Some careers, like accountancy or law, require particular mind sets and qualifications and a professional attitude and that’s fair enough. But if you only ever look out for certain people who all have the same traits, who are all ‘professionals’, then the world will end up like Equilibrium where everything and everyone is super grey until Christian Bale comes to save us with thousands of bullets. Variety – it’s the spice of life.

Look at Kanye West and the list of people he has collaborated with. There are conventional picks like Rihanna, Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj. Bon Iver? Chris Martin? Sir Paul McCartney? Less so. Different viewpoints, different experiences, different views of how to make something better. Whilst reaching the levels of fame these people have achieved requires some kind of professional mindset, it is only by allowing themselves to explore new ideas that they have been able to maintain their success instead of becoming one track wonders.

It’s weird how people say that it’s a good thing to be different and then typically look for people who closely conform to a particular type. It can be a minefield

trying to figure out what people want at the best of times.

One of the ironies of the world becoming a more ‘professional’ place is that these habits can make it worse rather than better. The New York Times recently announced that it is no longer going to be able to review every new film that is released in New York because of the trend of short term, limited venue “vanity releases.” Filmmakers, deliberately setting up short-term cinema releases to ensure that they got a review, were essentially screwing themselves over in an effort to attain the ‘professional’ cachet that an NYT review conferred.

Do you know what happened to Sabrina in the end? She got a job at Scorch Magazine, interviewed some musicians and then became a freelance writer. Do you know how she got to that point? By winning a competition, working in a coffee shop and not actually being good at magic. Fine, it’s a TV show that finished 12 years ago but there were signs then of the battles that young people were facing to get the creative jobs they wanted. Again, opportunities have increased but as more companies use online application processes, it becomes harder to sell yourself as anything more than the sum of your previous achievements. If companies want creative people in their businesses, maybe it’s time that they got creative with how they go about finding people in the first place.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Editors

sam bradleybethany thompson

you can read about our contributors at counterpointjournal.co.uk/writers or /illustrators

Pictures

alice carnegie

ross fraser mclean

bethany thompson

Words

sam bradley

sean douglass

riley kaminer

GETTING INVOLVED

We hope you liked reading our words and looking at our pictures as much as we enjoyed writing and drawing them. The next issue of Counterpoint is in the pipeline - if you want to help out, we’d love to hear from you.

We want writers, illustrators and photographers for our next issue. If you want to do something creative for Counterpoint, the best way to get in touch is to send us an email at counterpointeditor@gmail.com.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

3.0 Unported License.

The views expressed in this work are those of contributors and are not endorsed by

Counterpoint or its editorial staff.