5 minute read
Museums & Galleries
The fine art of stationery
Old master fine art and contemporary design inspires Museums & Galleries Ltd’s gift stationery, gifts, and gift packaging expansion.
Ever since its launch in the mid-1980s, Museums & Galleries Ltd has aimed to bring the cream of the world’s art heritage to beautifully made and produced gift stationery and greetings cards for the high street. Over the years the company has explored new product formats, innovated and refined its production techniques, and curated a commercially exciting and visually ravishing suite of fine arts and designbased gift products.
Today M&G has the outstanding retail offer in its field covering a wide choice from old master fine art to contemporary fashion design; iconic art heroes to budding contemporary artists and illustrators; anonymous archival discoveries to the most prestigious of fine art museum brands.
In its quest to continually introduce exciting new product formats to its stationery and gifts range, Museums & Galleries has become a destination shop for Christmas gifts as well as its fabulously diverse ranges of Christmas cards, boxed cards, wrap, tissue, and bags.
A really core strand of M&G’s offer is its beautiful selection of notebooks and journals. New this season are a quartet of beautiful luxury notebooks, part of M&G’s launches from two major British design talents: Sarah Campbell and Catherine Rowe.
M&G’s premier format notebooks are A5 in size, with 160 lined pages, soft-touch cover, foiled or colour paper edging, coloured endpapers, and lay-flat binding. The journals have branded belly bands. Suggested retail price is £9.99 per notebook.
Leading designer Sarah Campbell has an amazing portfolio of bright, fresh and beautiful prints dating back 50 years, and is still very much working today (she’s just held a ‘shop-in-shop’ at Anthropologie London). What sets Sarah apart from others is the colour, joy, and commercial appeal in her work. It channels the positivity which appeals to consumers now.
Cote D’Azur is Sarah›s most recognisable design. It
features strongly in the M&G collection - on greeting cards, gift wrap, tissue paper, as well as on one of the new luxury notebooks. It is an amazing pattern, both uncompromising and versatile, and in its life has been used on wallpaper, textiles, luggage and even a deckchair! A pattern with a past and a future. The second notebook features a sophisticated and lively seaside pattern, Sandpipers – a joy for bird and beach lovers.
Youthful designer Catherine Rowe’s career exploded when she won the Liberty Open Call competition in 2018 (her winning design is still on sale there). Always a retailer favourite in M&G’s card ranges, this year sees two new luxury notebooks from Catherine. She started with a very distinctive scraperboard technique, with bold patterning of florals against wildlife motifs. Drawing on fantasy, heraldic, and traditional styles, her beautiful sense of colour and composition is both contemporary and desirable. Her Lobster notebook is a distinct splash of colour and fun, whilst Bees is beautifully inspirational.
There are well over a hundred different titles in M&G’s journal and notebook collection, in various different formats and sizes. The covers feature designs from the UK’s leading museums: the V&A, British Museum, Natural History Museum, Tate, British Library, Transport for London as well as design stars like Matthew Williamson, Cressida Bell, Zandra Rhodes and of course Sarah Campbell, Catherine Rowe, and Helen Ahpornsiri’s Wild Press. Also worth exploring in this collection are BBC Earth, Paddington Bear, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and Roald Dahl.
Co-ordinating with the journals is an array of stationerythemed items: beautiful glass paperweights, pens and pencils (there’s a choice between HB pencil sets and coloured pencils) and organic cotton pencil cases. Folding stationery boxes also make thoughtful gifts for organised friends.
Heading up M&G’s collection of purely hedonistic gift items is a stunning collection of bamboo travel mugs featuring a host of classic designs like Alice in Wonderland from the British Library and dinosaurs from the Natural History Museum. Added to the mugs this season are insulated drinks bottles; premium cotton tote bags and roomy zipped pouch bags.
The drinks bottles feature designs from four of M&G’s biggest licenses – the V&A, Natural History Museum, British Museum, and Tate Gallery. The prints are bold, colourful, and stylish, with accent colour lids. Double-wall insulated and holding 500 ml, the bottles are suitable for either cold or hot drinks (SRP £18.99), and will be joy to pack in your bag on a day out this summer.
The same big four museums star on the coordinating totes and pouches. Made of premium organic cotton canvas, the totes are designed to be strong, stylish, and have real impact (SRP £14.99). The pouches (SRP £10.99) have a black lining and accent colour zip binding. Very flexible to use, they make great gifts.
The Natural History Museum tote bag, pouch, and drinks bottle showcase a stunning amethyst specimen print from the museum. This print also features as a facial covering and in M&G’s new sheet gift wraps, gift bags, and tissue collection.
To complete your gift selection, it’s worth having a look at M&G’s huge collection of sheet and roll wraps – both everyday and Christmas themed. Sheet wraps come in double-sided and foiled options as well as traditional, and the popular designs come with coordinating gift bag and gift tissue options. There are also bottle-sized gift bags for Christmas.
Heading up M&G’s delectable collection of gift items is a deluxe range of organic cotton tote bags featuring modern art from the Tate; Arts & Crafts design from the V&A; Hokusai’s Cranes from the British Museum; and gem stones from the Natural History Museum.
Tel: 01373 462165 Email: sales@mgml.co.uk Web: www.museumsgalleries.co.uk
