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Deborah Meaden’s Experience of a Failing Business
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If you decide to make the jump and set up your own business, chances are you’ll be offered tons of well-meaning advice. Some of it will be helpful, some of it will be rubbish, a lot of it will be contradictory. In Common Sense Rules, the new book from Deborah Meaden, the denizen of Dragons’ Den sets out to question the truth behind the clichés. Meaden believes that it is only by busting the myths behind these clichés that the business world can really move on.
In a series of 4 articles, Deborah Meaden will reveal to the The NextWomen her best tips for Success as an Entrepreneur. Here, in the second of the series, Deborah Meaden gives her top tips for securing investment.
My first business was a financial failure. When I was 19 years old, fresh out of business school and after a brief stint as a fashion showroom model, I had moved to Italy. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do – I just had a burning desire to run my own show. I have always loved art and sculpture and was incredibly inspired by what I saw during my time in Florence. The craftsmanship, style and breathtaking beauty of what was on offer moved me to make the decision to set up a glass and ceramics import business.
The next few months were a heady mix of dashing around the Italian countryside to visit factories where the air was filled with an intoxicating mix of rich tobacco smoke and chemicals, followed by endless sunny days stumbling down cobbled streets in historic cities to negotiate with immaculately turned out businessmen and women. Eventually I secured sole agency distribution rights with a good number of Italian businesses and immediately set about organising the next stage of my plan. I decided to launch my exciting new venture by exhibiting my prizes at the prestigious Top Drawer retail gift fair in London. On my trip back to the UK I was strangely nervous and apprehensive. I wondered if I had my timing right and whether the British public would be ready to recognise the extraordinary style of these Italian works and, more importantly, welcome them into their homes. Read more
Prado Museum Googlemaps their Masterpieces
Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights - Prado Online Gallery
The Prado museum in Madrid and Google Earth have come together to produce the first ever googlemapped art collection.
By satellite imagery and aerial photography Google Earth allows you to view anywhere on Earth from the comfort of your own sofa. The Prado museum houses major masterpieces of European art including The Annunciation by Fra Angelico; The Decent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, and The Three Graces by Rubens.
The marriage of the two – technology and art – means that fourteen of the museums masterpieces can now be seen online and in finite detail. The resolution of the images is so high that canvases can be visually scanned in far more detail than the naked eye could ever afford. Indeed the clarity is so, that a photograph from your standard 10 megapixel camera just wouldn’t compare to the 14 gigapixels at which the images have been painstakingly built up from. Read more
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