The story behind Glasgow’s Timorous Beasties

The story behind a globally renowned design company founded and based in Glasgow.

Transcript

00:00Tell us a bit about where we are right now and its kind of role in Terminus Species.

00:06We're in the print room which I guess is exactly how we started.

00:14We started to print our own fabrics, that was the first thing that we did.

00:19We'd learn how to design and create and actually make fabric at art school and

00:27it was our ambition really just to continue doing that.

00:32Living and working and marketing this is from Glasgow.

00:35Glasgow and Scotland has been a great support to us.

00:38We would have been out of business I think if we'd gone anywhere else

00:40and it continues to support what we're doing.

00:43I mean yes of course we'll get markets in America and elsewhere in the world which is going well.

00:51I think we've probably always just sort of stuck to our guns really you know and I think

00:56sitting here in the print room is the kind of product of what we do and I think

01:04what that is to have our own independence and be able to produce whatever the hell we want

01:11and never to condescend or second guess what our customer wants and keep things

01:17interesting and always be a company that's design led rather than market driven.

01:26Keeping ourselves and everyone else maybe a little bit on their toes and coming up with

01:33new ideas. A lot of things have changed over the years as well I mean we still do hand print

01:39but we've had all these technologies that have come along like digital technologies and

01:45World Wide Web and all those kind of things have sort of happened as we've been working and growing.

01:53It's 20 years on since your Glasgow design that became like a motif for the wallpaper.

02:00What was the story for that? What was the decision to kind of launch that out to the ether?

02:06Well I guess well firstly the wallpaper thing was a bit of an accident. I mean we never really

02:13you know you don't really study wallpaper design at college. I mean you sort of do

02:17you know you do pattern but you know well we started doing the wallpapers mainly because

02:25we were too broke to afford the fabric. You know when you think about it you know when you're

02:30producing you know fabric or wallpaper you've got to produce quite a large amount and just to get

02:37the different colors or and send out all the samples and have lengths to display and send

02:41out to retailers and you know so it ended up being that we couldn't actually afford to produce

02:48huge amounts of fabric and been working in a factory in my student days and we went down

02:56there and got lots of off cuts of wallpaper just to sort of experiment with and we kind

03:01of got into the wallpaper thing by sort of mistake.