thoughts

Recently we've been focusing our attention on the reliance we place on others - designers, chair manufacturers, dealers - to produce visual content for the blog.  Whilst in the past we've enjoyed trawling the interweb in search of favourable designs, beautiful shapes and inspirational interior spaces, the flip side is a blog which is nothing more than a catalogue, a reference point, a tool - devoid of any personality - used to locate, look up and read up on chair designs and designers.

It was never our intention to be a resource, a data bank - mainly because we don't have the requisite knowledge to fulfil this type of role - but this is what we've become.  Or at least, this is what our blog stats are telling us we've become.  Whatever .... but those stats are talking to us and we're listening.  And the more we listen, the more the whole blogging experience seems something of a treadmill from which, at times, we want to jump.

We reached a point not too long ago when continuing to churn out the same old same old was becoming increasingly difficult. Feeling we could hardly muster up enough enthusiasm to continue and constrained by a seemingly self-imposed blog about chairs, it felt like it was chairs or bust.  Was it possible to have a blog called chairsmith and write about something, anything, other than chairs or chair-related nonsense?  Would anyone notice either way, and in the grand scheme of things, did it actually matter?

In an attempt to move forward we considered giving up chairsmith and starting something afresh - we even went through the whole rigamorle of thinking up new names for our new blog.  But wait a minute .... what of all the hard work we'd put in to date and, more importantly, could we return to the lonely days of flat-lining blog stats - curse you blog stats - or a follower count in single digits?  No. No way.  For. Get. It.

So with the excitement of a new blog and the possibility of a new blog design well and truly behind us, we've decided to go for broke and stay put.  Not least because chairsmith was always meant to be a platform for our shoppe (yeah, OK, we're working on it) and having started brand building long before having anything to sell, swapping names simply to justify blog content seems, well, silly.

So, how to make the transition from what we've been doing to something a teensy bit different?  And what exactly will the 'teensy bit different' actually be?  Like we have a plan.  Let's just say things might be a teensy bit different around here from now on.  Hold tight!