I just had a week away from it all. It gave me some time to catch up on a bit of reading – the highlight of it was an impulse buy in the airport: “A Book About Innocent“.  If you’re interested in starting a business, or seeing how a successful brand is built, I’d highly recommend it.

The book is the story of how innocent drinks started up, built their brand and expanded their markets & range (now selling about 500,000 bottles a day). If that sounds a bit dull, the book is really well written in a conversational tone (keeping in line with the innocent brand image), and is both funny and entertaining.

I’ve always admired innocent’s brand image – there is always some humour behind their packaging, and the company is socially responsible – they donate a percentage of profits to charity, and use sustainable methods throughout their supply chain. Seeing how they came to that point in the book was really interesting. They have a great attention to detail (ever look at the bottom of one of their bottles or read the labels?), an interesting approach to market research and a great appreciation of how to listen to their customers. Some of it also gave me some good ideas for my own work – for example – they discuss how they got around having no marketing budget to promote themselves starting out.

There’s a video below that gives an overview of the company (and covers some of the stuff that’s in the book):

Well worth a read (their drinks are pretty nice too!).

They’ve published the book themselves, and it’s for sale online for €15 through originalwriting.ie. You can read some of the excerpts on their site, as well as some unpublished short stories by the members of the group.

It’s a good read!

One of my aims for the new year was to post more of what I’m up to. I’ve been pretty lax on my reading of late; while I spend lots of time reading blogs, I’ve been spending far less than I used to reading books. So, I’m going to try and use the blog to motivate myself to read more of the stack of books I’m accumulating (another 15 unread over Christmas!).

I just finished “On Writing” by Stephen King, a great book for anyone that’s interested in writing. It gives lots of practical advice and insights into his writing process. It’s aimed at those interested in starting out writing fiction, but lots of the advice he gives is useful no matter what subject you’re writing about. While I wouldn’t be a huge fan of his fiction, I thought On Writing was a fantastic read.

Oddly I found parts of it related very well to web design / development, for example, when talking about the use, and overuse, of descriptive language :

“….if [the setting] turns out not to be a major part of the story, I’d do well to revise the descriptive stuff down by a few lines in the next draft. Certainly I couldn’t keep it in on the grounds that it’s good; it should be good, if I’m being paid to do it. What I’m not being paid to do is be self-indulgent” (emphasis added)

Another great point I took away was that:

“Life is not a support system for art. It is the other way around”

I think you can substitute the word “work” for art and still be left with something you’d do well to remember.

Next in the pile of books is In Exile by Billy O’Callaghan (2008); it’s a book of short stories that’s been a good read so far, although I’m not far into it.

If you’ve got any recommendations for other good books you picked up over the Christmas I’d love to hear them (so I can add them to the growing mountain of reading I’ve got to do).