Genesis
The original ‘little imp’ when he was three.
What is in a name?
“Where did the name come from?” I, quite genuinely, get asked this so often that I thought that I would let you all in on the back story that explains a bit about the name and a lot about how Little Imp came to be.
In 2012, after nearly 2 years of touring around the USA with a production of ‘Peter Pan’ with our baby/toddler, my husband and I returned to London only for it to become abundantly clear that my job as a stage manager and my husband’s as a performer flying director weren’t at all compatible with being parents. It had all been well and good when we had been on tour and we had no bills or housing to pay for, and I wasn’t working full-time, but once settled back in London, reality hit home, HARD. In a year or so, our boy would have to go to school and the anti-social hours of theatre were just not going to work out- they already weren’t working out. One of us was going to have to be around. In order that my husband could still work theatre hours, I briefly took a sales job. This was soul-destroying work for me and a little part of me died every time I got on the train to work. I missed the theatre so much, it was actually painful and I hated having to leave my kid in nursery all day long. Not to mention the astronomical cost of childcare! I mean, what was the point of working if literally all of my salary was spent on nursery fees? And what was the point of having a child if I didn’t get to spend any time with him? I didn’t want to play. I needed a way out.
So, call me a fool- and I mean, I really was- I set about learning to make jewellery in hopes that it was something that I would be able to do part-time whilst raising my child. I really had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that I had to make it work. I took a couple of very basic day classes, but for the most part, I was self taught. Properly fucking it up and learning as I went. Because of my background making/repairing theatre props,I was pretty handy and certainly not afraid to experiment. In the early days, I exclusively made keepsake jewellery- hand/footprints, fingerprints and children’s drawings etc. My earliest efforts were pretty clumsy and it’s a bit embarrassing to look back now but I was so proud of what I had taught myself to do and I blindly leapt into the world of Etsy to set up my shop.
One of the first things that I needed to do was pick a name for the business, ugh. I read, somewhere, that when setting up a jewellery business it was a good idea for the name not to be too specific as the business would likely change directions over time and then the name might not be appropriate. Because I knew that I would likely want to move in different directions with the type of jewellery that I made, it would not be sensible, for example, to call my business 'Sarah’s Fingerprint Jewellery’ (cringy, I know but roll with it- it’s just an example) even though this was what I was making at the time. So I wracked my tiny brain and asked myself how I could incorporate what I was doing now into the name in a manner that would still be relevant, or at least not totally irrelevant, if the business were to change tack. Thinking about it, what I was creating was jewellery with ‘imprints’- handprints, fingerprints etc, but I didn’t really want to use the word imprint because it was just far too heavy-handed. So, I broke the word down into it’s constituent parts ‘imp’ and ‘print’ and because my 3 year old was genuinely a ‘little imp’ at the time, it just seemed to make sense.
And there you have it. The name stuck and it has served me pretty well over the years. I OFTEN think about changing the name though, so we’ll see. I have aspirations to move into higher-end jewellery in the future and I do sometimes wonder if it might be advantageous to trade under my own name, but that comes with complications of its own. Do I call myself Sarah Hughes, or Sian Kemp, or Sarah Kemp or Sian Hughes- I have too many damned names, it’s confusing as hell. But that’s a whole other story…
