Hi there,
I better introduce myself - My name is Martyn and i am the owner and designer of Geekcycled. Geekcycled all started because the stress of teaching got to me and well I thought a change of career direction was a good thing. I started making coasters and other items for the house as a way of trying to keep busy. Then i thought that if I liked the things I was making, well then other people might want to actually buy them from me and thus Geekcycled was born.
Every business has to start with it's first sale and that came just before Halloween of 2011 when one of Mrs G's friends asked me to create a decoupage plate for a friend as a house warming gift. Then obviously we got our first (non-friend) sales and got good feedback and it's started to build and the items we make have expanded and developed as any evolving business needs to do.
With a bit of help from a local business development company, Blue Orchid, we have looked at all the parts of the business. I still don't really understand that much about the sales pipeline, i don't care for cold calling. But it's all been a learning experience and obviously this is one of my first goes at social media - I do have twitter and facebook accounts, not that i'm particularly good at using them. I'm going to make a real effort to try to improve this part of my business.
Geekcycled is all about creating cool and personal gifts for people who are "geeky". Obviously geeks come in all shapes, sizes and types. But whether you "geek" over comics, science, literature, music or pretty much anything else i want to try to help.
How would i describe myself? Well i love Game of Thrones, i've read all the books that are currently out and have seasons 1-3 on DVD. Yes I know Season 5 is currently on Sky - but do i need Sky TV, probably not. Well that's what i try to convince myself of - what would i do with it just watch more TV and i'd probably try to justify having the sports channel. What a waste of money that would be, I was born in Middlesbrough ( the chemical capital of North East England - hence the name "smoggy" to describe those living/born there). We do have a football team, but i'm not not going to say the're great, they are fighting to be promoted to the premiership, but if I say they'll get there, well they'll start playing like a pub team. I enjoy watching football, Mrs G doesn't enjoy watching it so much. Back in 2006 Middlesbrough did what now seems like an impossible task of getting to the Uefa cup final, that's the second best cup in European cup football. They did this by coming back from 3 goals down in both the quarter and the semi finals, this was crazy and surreal football and there was a whole load of encouragement and shouting on both those nights. Mrs G wasn't impressed with all the noise. Jenny (Mrs G) has been to one football game, but her highlight was the opposition manager screaming at one of his players for tying his bootlace whilst the game was going on.
I've sort of got off the point there - back to what sort of geek am I?
- I love Game of Thrones, along with Stephen King and historical fiction such as Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe and Grail stories.
- I enjoy comics.
- Obviously i'm a bit of a craft geek - i enjoy hardware stores. But my father used to work in a school technology department, so i associate him with the smell of sawdust, oil and assorted tools. I like to think that I might have inherited some of his handiness.
- I love nature and history documentaries - basically factual programmes or those based on fact are good. On a little aside - two films i would recommend are Downfall (about the last days of WW2, ok it's in German and has subtitles but it was a great movie - thought provoking) and Pierrepoint which is about the last hangman in the UK (in the US it's called Pierrepoint - The last hangman). Neither are fun in an action/comedy movie way - but very interesting - in my opinion.
- I enjoy CSI, NCSI, Chuck, Dexter and my current favourite is Grimm. Grimm is a cop show set in Portland, Oregon in which the stories are based on classic fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood. The main character is a policeman and also a Grimm, this means he can see the other forms of certain people who are Wessen. This is the catch all name for ogres, witches and other fairy tale type characters such as big bad wolves and little pigs.
Well that's probably enough for now
Behind every geeky man there's an even geekier woman quoting Star Trek!
