howies invited us to the opening launch of their shop on Carnaby Street, London, yesterday. We’d seen pictures of the shop, but it’s even better in the flesh. Even though it’s small, the shop if perfectly formed with loads of nice details, including hand-drawn illustrations on the walls, a sink so customers can re-fill their water bottles, bookshelves crammed with interesting books, and an amazing wooden table upstairs that has the girl’s jeans laid on. The shop really captures what howies is about, something that can’t have been easy to convey with it being in central London. For a first attempt at a shop, the howies team have done brilliantly.

All the guests that attended were given a tree sappling as a present. As it’s coming up to the end of Thoughtful’s first year, we had the idea of planting the trees, and taking pictures of them every year. The pictures would make nice page dividers if we ever do a 20 year book of Thoughtful’s work.

While we were on the very boring trip down to London, we played a ’designers edition’ of eye spy inpired by a post on Russell Davies’ blog. The game was to spot vans and lorries with the most useless company straplines.

Here’s our top three.