The third craftscotland AGM took place at the Waterside hotel in Inverness on 4 October 2007.  Acting project manager talked about the growth of the initiative over the past year and looked forward to the coming six months.

Our Vision

The vision of craftscotland is to ‘Ensure that the Scottish craft sector achieves its full potential by becoming the world leader in crafts promotion.’

This vision is supported by our mission statement which has 4 core strands:

• Managing a world class web resource
• Developing a brand for Scottish craft
• Engaging with makers to promote the best practice
• Be the recognised gateway for craft in Scotland for the public and crafts community and enable people nationally and internationally to experience Scottish contemporary craft

Over the last year you’ll be able to see how these four objectives are developing.

craftscotland Website

At the heart of the craftscotland website are the two directories for makers and for outlets.  There are now 1223 makers and outlets registered on the directory – so we are close to reaching 50% of an estimated 3,000 craft businesses in Scotland.  These directories are growing steadily with 15 to 20 new people joining each month.  The directory receives over 5,000 searches a month and we know makers get contacted by galleries, shops, curators and individual buyers.

This directory is balanced by the editorial content of the website – news, features, opportunities, events listings, a discussion forum, bulletin board and business advice.  In the past year we have published over 80 news stories and features, reviewed exhibitions such as The Cutting Edge exhibition, profiled students from the Degree Shows and published three online craftfocus exhibitions.  These exhibitions are curated for us by a panel of eight members of the crafts community from across Scotland. 

Building Online Resources

In our exhibition on Anna King in December last year we made two short films – one of Anna demonstrating making string from plant fibre and a second where she talks about her book of string samples.  Each of these films have been downloaded over 700 times from the website, and they are currently on show in her solo exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. 

This is an important development for the website and we plan to create a section which archives films about makers and their work, not always made by us, which can be accessed and used as a resource.  We have around 10 already in different parts of the site and a new film will be added soon made by a group of school pupils at Inverness Academy about one of the Highland Craft Residencies.

Other popular downloads on the site are in opportunities - 227 people downloaded information about a selling exhibition in Milan, 207 information about a wood competition in Austria and 200-400 people download information about conferences.  In business advice our factsheet on pricing your work has been downloaded over 1400 times.

Who Visits the Website

The number of people visiting and using the site has continued to grow.  In year one we had 135,469 unique visitors, in year two 399,615 and in our third year we have almost doubled that figure to 748,942.  In April we celebrated our one millionth visitor since the launch of the site and we now receive from 50,000 to 70,000 visitors each month.

So what do we know about these visitors?  We know where they visit on the site – features on the makers going to Origin: the London Craft Fair and the craftfocus exhibitions are the most popular areas of the site.  We also know which part of the world they live in.

Over the past year the site was visited by people from 149 countries.  The top ten countries are UK, USA (mainly from California and New York but someone from every State in America has visited the site), Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany.  The next ten countries include New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, China and Brazil.

We were visited by 507 cities in the UK and the top ten include London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Brentford, Glasgow, Watford, Milton Keynes and Sheffield. A year ago the majority of visits to the site were from people in Scotland, now 24% of visits are from people in London, for cities in the rest of the country including Scotland it is around 4%. 

In April 2005 we started a monthly e-mail newsletter and this has grown from a circulation of 500 to over 2,500 and around 30 new people register each month.  We can trace how they found the website and usually it is from searching for an individual who they then find on the directory or mentioned in the editorial.

Providing Information

We receive a constant flow of enquiries from all over the world.  We’ve helped the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Scottish Office in Whitehall, the Museum of Art & Design in New York and a TV producer in Singapore making a programme about paper artists from across the world who wanted to feature jeweller Naoko Yoshizawa.  We helped a couple visiting from New Zealand to find studios and galleries to visit in south Scotland and a Glasgow based woman who wanted to buy a Shetland style knitting chair.  She had seen one a few years ago in an exhibition in Lerwick – we helped her to trace the furniture maker and her husband has now commissioned the chair to give her as a birthday present.

We get enquiries from new galleries wanting to source makers and from makers wanting business advice.  These enquiries, along with information from our annual maker research, help us identify areas where we can help makers.  In July we held our first joint event with the Crafts Council, Scottish Arts Council and the Cultural Enterprise Office about different selling events which was very successful, and we are talking about future events with the Cultural Enterprise Office and craft development officers.

We receive a lot of media enquiries – journalists see us as a way to get reliable information quickly and easily – and we now work with several magazines for each issue and other monthly magazines and have been contacted by journalists in Sweden and New York.

Because of our size and our ability to cover the whole of Scotland we are being approached about opportunities which will benefit craft across Scotland and one of the most exciting of these is a recent approach from the Sunday Herald who have asked us to research and writ a series of craft trails.  We are planning to run two before Christmas on Ayrshire and Fife with two after the New Year on Aberdeenshire and the Highlands.

craftscotland Exhibitions

A year ago we held our first offline exhibition promoting Scottish craft at Homes & Interiors Scotland 2006.  This was an opportunity to bring quality craft to a new audience and was very successful – with 13,500 visitors, press coverage, and positive feedback from visitors and exhibitors. 

We held a second exhibition in September 2007 and it was equally successful with 12,500 visitors and 300 people entering our prize draw.  Unlike the first year work was for sale and we had a small selection of smaller items for sale as well and sold just over £1,200 of work.  This allowed us to test the market for sales at this event which will help us to decide what to do next year.

A year ago we carried out research trips to various international craft events to decide where we wanted to exhibit.  We decided that we should apply to take part in Collect: the international art fair for contemporary objects organised by the Crafts Council. 

Collect is an international celebration of museum-quality objects from 42 of the world’s leading galleries and is held in the V&A in London.  Since its launch in February 2004, it has built an outstanding reputation for showcasing work by the world’s most important artists in contemporary applied and decorative arts. In 2006 attendance figures were more than 11,000 over the five days.

We invited applications and our craftfocus panel selected a group of makers with international reputations to put forward.  The selection panel for Collect considered each person put forward individually and then as a group, and accepted our stand, which we were absolutely delighted about, as it is a tough selection process.  We are taking thirteen makers:  Ray Flavel, glass, Simon Ward, ceramics, Deirdre Nelson, textiles, Anna King, fibre, Jilli Blackwood, textiles, Grainne Morton, jewellery, shortlisted for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize this year, Sara Keith textiles – Silver Wishes which won a media in Korea in 2005, Graham Stewart, silver, Anna Gordon, jewellery and four emerging makers, three jewellers - Sarah Keay, Hannah Louise Lamb, and Marianne Anderson, and Andrea Walsh, ceramics.

Six Months Ahead

Looking forward, here are a few of the key developments which will happen over the next six months

• Developing site content with pro-formas for events and opportunities, new training section and a new craft organisations directory which can be updated by the organisations
• Developing range of e-mail newsletters so we can collect more information on audiences and target information to specific groups
• Two craftsfocus exhibitions – a solo show on jeweller Dorothy Hogg and one on the makers we are taking to Collect
• New selling events section & PR advice – specialist information from stylists and other experts
• Exhibition at Collect 2008 – we are planning to produce a DVD about the makers we are showing and craft in Scotland and the website, 500 copies will be circulated to curators, museums and galleries internationally and across the UK
• We then plan to hold a series of events across Scotland with makers who took part to share the Collect experience
• Researching & developing income streams – research and other services
• Applying for funding for a temporary craft audience development post

It has been a very busy and successful third year, and I’d like to finish with a quote from the catalogue for the Cutting Edge exhibition.  Simon Olding was commissioned to write about craft in Scotland and after visiting craftscotland he wrote in his essay:

‘Craftscotland is perhaps the perfect exemplar of the economy and information pulses behind Scottish craft policy and activity.... In its first breathless year, craftscotland has become a truly dynamic portal... '
‘It has the verve of the Australian website craft culture produced by Craft Victoria, with the authority that derives from consensus, independence, and a shared vision.  It has no parallel in England.'

Tina Rose, acting project manager