Craft Focus - August/September 2020 (Issue 80)

75 ACID Chinese manufactured products there is more of an opportunity to buy UK product. Buy British! Brexit is also a precursor for buying British and post COVID-19 even more so. • BRAND BUILDING We are creating art classes on Instagram. A total of 200 people joined and turned it into a subscription box. Keep core business going and selling products with rainbows – NHS, finding products that are a sign of the times. Juggling balls as a small business is key, get team input. All staff have families and children and finding life tricky. Focus on a website push. Keep going and drive to online business, this will lead to your brand being further exposed. With high street future in jeopardy, this could be the nail in the coffin. Basically, keep positive, and create the bug to adapt and build on growing online sales. • COVID EMERGENCY STRATEGY Priority, strategizing how we can get manufacturing back, safely with other trades? How can we make distance working work? Returning to work will bring back overheads and not necessarily the business to cover overheads, so give people time to find solutions. Be confident about the future – things will be different, hold on to the fact that as the UK, we are all pretty entrepreneurial. • WEBINARS Think about webinars that will add value with specialist subjects. The market is saturated with COVID-19 seminars, there are other things that we are starting to cover like coming out of the current crisis, design protection, etc. When folks are time-rich there is resilience, a time for quirky ideas, keeping spirits up. SnapDragon had a party for their Queens Award. Ideas to cheer people along. • SHARING TEAM SKILLS Our own team of 30 people have different skills e.g., this week excel master class questions, next week there is a meeting on merchandising within the team. Designers rarely know anything about excel so this type of upskilling adds to their knowledge. Meditation classes, yoga, fitness can all be done online. Set up an online area to build up skills e.g. how to do social media. Concentrate on small amounts of good news. CASE STUDIES • ACID Case Study 1 – Tick boxes. Always read the small print! Recently a company joined ACID after they had received a letter accusing them of alleged copying. One of the reasons they had joined is because they would have been able to take advantage of the ACID member to member mediation service. Although member to member complaints are rare – there have only been a dozen or so in over 20 years – the ACID mediation framework is a very cost and time effective alternative means of dispute resolution. It is timed and without lawyers, so costs are minimal. Before joining, any potential member cannot progress joining ACID unless they have ticked a box to confirm they have no unresolved disputes with an existing ACID member and are not aware of circumstances which might lead to a dispute with any ACID member. Sadly, we had to revoke this company’s membership because they had joined and not read the rules and regulations. As a result, they were not able to use the benefit of the ACID mediation protocol. Any future membership of ACID is doubtful. The ACID Code of Conduct was carefully created to provide a framework of rules to which all members must comply and also to give the public confidence as to the integrity of its members. • ACID Case Study 2 – Is it OK to copy other’s technical, expert instructions? No. these are protected by copyright! Although many are aware of copyright rules, a recent case came to our attention where one company had exactly copied, word for word, another company’s detailed technical instructions thinking this was OK. They clearly thought they could take the easy journey to providing detailed advice on how to use the product effectively by just cutting and pasting fairly complex technical data. Conditions of use, such as specialised washing instructions often take a long time to prepare, especially if they are bespoke to a particular type of specialised product. The way they are written, especially if they contain specialist, detailed information will be a copyright work so beware. It doesn’t pay to take the fast track to other’s content, ever! To find out more, visit www.acid.uk.com