Those of you familiar with Mr B’s may have noticed a sudden glut of merchandise offerings over the past few months. We are having a whole lot of fun with this and we hope you are enjoying it too. It’s been a looooong time coming but we’re finally catching up with ourselves and have let our creative juices flow!
When you’re running an independent bookshop, or indeed any retail business, you are usually rich in ideas but poor in time to be able to execute them. Such was the case with Mr B’s merchandise. For many many moons we have had our Mr B’s Rewrites the Classics mug and cloth bag and Mr B’s logo tshirt. We often get customers sending us photos of them found randomly in the “wild” where they’re discovered in airb’n’b kitchen cupboards or hanging from a cowboy saddle in Texas!
But while we know our customers have loved these, we’ve always been itching to expand the designs and range of our merch offer especially as we have watched Mr B’s grow and wend its way into so many people’s hearts. We are asked daily if we have postcards, bookmarks or stickers of the shop – some kind of momento that people can proudly display or use and think of us when they do. Alongside our devoted loyal fan base we have so many visitors from abroad who want to take a piece of Mr B’s back home with them, especially something that can fit inside a bulging suitcase.
Pandemics aside, it has been so very hard to find the time to get our act together with the merch and every time we dipped our toes into researching all things merch-y it was all a little daunting. We know a whole lot about books but the world of sticker and pin badge designing is another ball game with so unfamiliar things to consider from supply to sizing, before you even get into the details of the design side of things. So our ideas got kicked into the long grass until we found that fictional thing called “more time”.
It was following visits to some incredible bookshops in the U.S. and in Europe over the last year or two that finally spurred us into real action. If you’ve ever been to some of these, they are the masters of merch and it was really special to be able to bring a little reminder of these shops home with us.
Luckily, we have some super-creative folk working at the shop to help come up with the designs. We really wanted to focus on some of the iconic features of Mr B’s, something which we thought our customers would appreciate.
Liv came up with the idea of using the Mr B’s bathtub in Ed’s brilliant limited edition linocuts of the shop and using this as a key feature in the new luxury canvas bag, postcards and stickers.
The very talented Katrina drew a gorgeous illustration of our shop front and of the reading spa chair for our new mugs. We also had fun tying in some details from the shop such as using the diamond shapes in our postcards from the Imaginarium floor, and the orange handles and little zip pocket on the canvas bag being the same colour as our fireplace wall.
Not forgetting our army of devoted young customers, we wanted to create something that would excite kids too and so Mrs B asked her daughter Jess (12 years old) to create a book-loving character for a sticker – a character who was, above all else, just super cute. And so our mini-mascot “Puddle” was born. Named by one of our customers on Instagram, you’ll see him on stickers and pin badges. Since the conception of Puddle OG there is now a Summer Puddle, Halloween Puddle and a Christmas Puddle. Jess has threatened me with so many future potential variations of Puddle, we are considering a separate Puddle Store 🙂 Watch out for the likes of Pride & Puddle and Sherlock Puddle coming to a Mr B’s near you!
We’re so pleased to finally have a proper range of all things Mr B’s to offer you. It’s all available online and in-store. We can send all over the world and we’ve even created a Mr B’s Merch Bundle and a B-Luxe Merch Bundle with a cheeky discount built in.
Watch out for more to come. We’re on a roll!