Im sure many of you having been asking yourselves for quite some time now just what exactly is this Indies Anonymous thing all about? Well, in a nutshell its pretty much all about dobbing your fellow Indie friends in for all the other awesomeness that they get up to (in addition to their regular everyday awesomeness that is) but let me explain.
Indies Anonymous really started when I learned that the Dark Chocolate Fudge recipe that I had entered in a Whittakers Facebook competition had made it through to the testing stage. Recipes which shone in the testing stage would be published in the forthcoming Whittakers cookbook A Passion for Chocolate and as an Indie Designer naturally my thoughts turned to how I might use this fortuitous opportunity to garner more attention and interest in Ami Ana! But when the time came for me to blow my own horn, I was suddenly not so keen. By contrast when fellow local Indie Colleen of Dear Colleen had the PR dream of a lifetime come true, I couldnt say enough about her fantastic artwork and talent.
In fact when it comes to celebrating Indies and their gifts there is nothing I love to do more – I relish in raving over Gill of Mudbirds gorgeous ceramics, I am forever swooning over Mel of Black Swans stunning and uniquely NZ Jewellery, I am a hopeless sucker for Sema of Artiflaxs flax bouquets and artwork, I have long mental lists of go-to Indies that I would readily run to for shopping emergencies or that I frequently highly recommend to others, and Indie advocating initiatives and the people behind them are high on my list of favourite people. Put simply, I revel in lauding fellow Indies, imaginative Indie promoting people and initiatives, and all their general cleverness, but am loathe to talk up my own.
It occurred to me that this was a tendency not limited to just myself, but that other Indies quite possibly whilst shy to celebrate their own Indie amazingness and multi-talented abilities, likewise savoured in gushing over and drawing attention to the awesome work of fellow Indies. It occurred to me that these tendencies to hide ourselves and our work in the shadows whilst shuffling others out onto centre stage could be put to good use. After all are we not still achieving the same desired effect of garnering attention for Indies regardless of who is doing the garnering?
And from that the idea for Indies Anonymous came into being a place, a forum if you will, for Indies to gloat over and extol the talents of their fellow Indies and friends be they related to those individuals Indie ventures or no where we can enjoy unabashedly talking each other up, thus creating great opportunities for exposure for NZ Indies, their ventures and those who champion them, while at the same time still allowing us to remain acceptably modest and coy but only about ourselves! ; )
SO this is the part where all of you out there come in. WE. NEED. YOUR. HELP! We want to tell New Zealand, nay the world, about how fantastic our Indie designers, artists and crafters and the people who support and champion them are but we need you to out them for all those marvellous things that they are too shy to share with us. Thats why we need you your job is to tell us what you know! If a fellow Indie has multiple closeted other talents theyre keeping from us, if one of their many other talents has landed them in the limelight, if dedicated Indie advocates are quietly doing amazing things in your area then WE. WANT. TO. KNOW! We want to know so that we can let other Indies know how wonderful they are and we want to know so that we can say this secret squirrel home baker just so happens to also be an Independent Fashion Designer to be reckoned with!