The story behind Timorous Beasties iconic Glasgow wallpaper

Glasgow-founded brand Timorous Beasties released a Glasgow-inspired wallpaper which became one of their most iconic designs.

Transcript

00:00It's 20 years on since your Glasgow design that became like a motif for the wallpaper.

00:07What was the story for that? What was the decision to launch that out to the ether?

00:13Well, I guess, well, firstly the wallpaper thing was a bit of an accident. I mean, we

00:18never really, you know, you don't really study wallpaper design at college. I mean, you certainly

00:25do pattern. But, well, we started doing the wallpapers mainly because we were too broke

00:33to afford the fabric. You know, when you think about it, when you're producing, you know,

00:40fabric or wallpaper, you've got to produce quite a large amount just to get the different

00:44colours and send out all the samples and have lengths to display and send out to retailers.

00:50And, you know, so it ended up being that we couldn't actually afford to produce huge

00:55amounts of fabric. And I'd been working in a factory in my student days and we went down

01:03there and got lots of offcuts of wallpaper just to sort of experiment with. And we kind

01:08of got into the wallpaper thing by mistake. But the Glasgow Twilight, you know, which

01:16is the design based on Glasgow, was done because we were given a space to exhibit

01:22in London and we didn't have that much time. And so just actually been playing around with

01:27the idea and just kind of came up with it and just covered everything in the room with

01:32the Glasgow Twilight. And so that's kind of how it happened. Yet again, it was, you know,

01:38a bit of a joke and a bit of a laugh. It wasn't really meant to be, you know, as I

01:47guess it has become slightly more iconic. But what was nice about that was, and it was

01:53something we said through a friend of ours, who had overheard some folk looking at it

01:57and saying, oh, that Timorous Pieces have really sold out now. Because the Twilight,

02:00you know, it's got that kind of look until you look a little bit closer. And it was,

02:05you know, it was just more realistic, which is originally what Twilights were about. You

02:09know, they reflected what was going on at the time. They weren't these things that people

02:14are used to. So the first impression, which was perfect for us, was that we'd sold out.

02:20We were trying to conform to something that would maybe sell. And, you know, it got more

02:26notoriety than it did get sales. That's what I'm saying. But value in the contribution

02:31that it has to the company. It's either the money or it's in, I don't know, what would you call it?

02:36Kudos? Would it be, you know?