Visit Ian Flaherty at his studio and you'll find him working at the coal face with his subordinates, unafraid to get his hands dirty. A Scouser by birth and the son of a builder he chose a different career path that lead him out of working class Liverpool and into London, the fashion capitol of the world.
After designing for many prestigious brand names Ian Flaherty thought it was time to harness his energies and direct them toward developing his own brand. It's been a long road from Liverpool, now his delightful designer cufflinks are displayed in some of the most famous department stores around the world, including Selfridges and John Lewis (UK), Nordstroms (USA) David Jones (Australia) plus stores in Japan with un-pronounceable names.
The cufflink market has become crowded as designer brands cash in on the growing popularity of designer silver cufflinks. Plus there is the lure of manufacturing in Asia as a way to increase profits, but not without risk of negative effect on your reputation. Increasing profits at your customer's expense does not make good long term business sense. Ian's a big fan of traditional British craftsmanship and prefers the workmanship he gets from his own Battersea studio.
Ian literally draws his design inspiration from the world around him. He's always looking at patterns and reflections, sketching things that catch his eye as he walks down the street.
Ian's designs are hand cast in pure English pewter, because it gives the most accurate result. Each item is double plated in rhodium, a precious metal derived from platinum, and polished before being hand-enamelled or inset with Swarovski Crystals. Then polished and inspected again to make sure it's flawless. Rhodium prevents tarnishing and adds functionality to form making them extremely hard wearing, less likely to be scarred thus adding value. His cufflinks don't tarnish and neither will his reputation. His customers keep coming back for more precisely because he does not cut corners.
He continues his work happily labelled "the quiet achiever", carving out a name for himself in the fashion capitol of the world. The only thing that overshadows Ian's immense talent is his sincerity; his working class principles remain intact.
Having a pair of his fashion accessories in your collection is a must; you'll reveal their unique story each time you bind your links to cuff.
A closing historic anecdote: Swank Inc a popular designer and manufacturer of men's cufflinks were incorporated on April 17, 1936. When Cufflinks peaked in the 1960's they were making 12 million a year. Even though these were aimed at the lowest end of the market, retailing for an average of $2.50 a pair, that still adds up to a lot of men wearing cufflinks. These days the figure is closer to 200,000, but cufflinks are making a strong comeback with gross sales having increased consistently over the last ten years, while the French cuff continues to be the most prestigious type of shirt.
The most expensive cufflinks ever sold were a pair given to the soon-to-be
King Edward VIII by his later wife Wallis Simpson. These featured diamonds set in platinum and sold at auction for $440,000. The most a pair of Flaherty cufflinks will cost you is £67.00.
Takes On The World
The Macintosh interface was immediately popular with non-technical people. Instead of typing in a command to delete a file as in DOS, you could drag it to the on-screen trashcan. Although common today, it was a breakthrough to have such capability on a personal computer.
The Mac has also used consistent menus, and Apple-published guidelines for application design are generally followed. In operation, the operating system and applications are almost indistinguishable, and Apple has always kept technical jargon to a minimum. The Mac's graphical ability made it a natural for graphics shops and desktop publishing. It might have been slow, but it was far more affordable than the workstations used for such purposes.
The Mac came out in 1984, three years after the DOS-based PC. Its graphical interface was more intuitive than DOS commands, and it avoided the technical quagmire that arose when DOS users tried to add a new device to their PCs.
Why then didn't the Mac take the world by storm? There were several reasons.
DOS Was Faster
DOS PCs were much faster. It takes much more CPU power to display graphics than text, and the Mac was underpowered by comparison.
Too Much Mouse
the command languages that could automate a myriad of tasks in the DOS world were woefully absent in the Mac. There was sound reason for the expression, "real programmers don't use mice."
In addition, Apple initially overemphasized the mouse and gave little thought to intelligent keyboard commands. This was hardly a way to gain market share in a world where keyboard-intensive word processing was the single largest application.
By Then, DOS Was Entrenched
Mac applications were eventually enhanced, and speed was dramatically increased, but the DOS world was simply too entrenched by the time those improvements came about. Windows 3.0, which offered a graphical interface with some of the Mac's advantages, ran as an extension to DOS and was its natural successor. Windows 95 added most of the graphical features of the Mac, and by this time, it was no contest. The world was buying Windows.
Macs Cost More
the Mac was always pricier than a PC, which purchasing agents found hard to justify. Although many corporate users bought their own Macs due to their aversion to PCs, technical personnel were not fond of supporting them. They sweated bullets dealing with DOS and Windows. Supporting yet another environment was not met with enthusiasm.
Proprietary Technology
Unlike the PC, the Mac is Apple's proprietary technology, and except for a brief period, Apple prevented a Macintosh clone industry from developing and growing. Apple maintained its sole source vendor status while the PC industry had thousands of vendors.
In Summary As a result, the Macintosh was used sporadically in the corporate world, but due to its natural bent, became popular in desktop publishing and graphics design. The Mac pioneered the use of personal computers for these applications and became the de facto standard in the graphics arts industry.
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Both Morton Hartley & Monica Craft are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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