Love and Light in Lockdown

Love and Light. Optimism and hope. The zeitgeist of our times. How do we recognise what we’re all going through? How do we draw closer to the new world of sensibility and consideration our customers and end users are increasingly inhabiting?

Shortlisted for the Good Retail Awards 2020 Community Award, Paper Starlights specialise in high impact displays made from natural and sustainable materials. And - with our background in UK Festivals, Events, Community Arts and Christmas Markets - what we love most is putting on a show!

Décor and displays are a magical and creative way to bring people together through the mutual appreciation of sensory experience. By creating an emotional response, a good display can build community, create a relationship with location, engender a shared ownership of space, and create a dialogue with the end user.

As a company which has always aspired to trade fairly and sustainably, the only certainties we can have lie in our values. What makes us tick. Why we do what we do. We are determined more than ever to understand our supply chain and customers as a community. A community that links suppliers of materials, designers, makers, distributors, clients, and customers – one that stretches all the way from source of production through to the end user.

By understanding supply chains as communities, it becomes possible to make interventions in existing business models. This particularly applies to sustainability initiatives. How can we improve, as a community? Get better, support one another? Become more sustainable – environmentally for sure, but also in terms of our understanding of how trade can be used for mutual benefit?

During the initial Covid lockdown of 2020, we used our capacity and infrastructure to create displays in care homes for the elderly and Ashgate Hospice, Derbyshire, in honour of the work done by these key agencies. Our main display unit was also used to create community-focused displays within Morrisons Supermarkets to celebrate their support of key workers.

"They look absolutely amazing thank you so much..they are beautiful! Fab greeting at the start of shift" - Healthcare Assistant, Ashgate Hospice.

Share the Light

As the lockdown continued into 2021, we continued to shine a light in the darkness with our ‘Share the Light’ Campaign. This saw 100s of homes and business across Chesterfield, Matlock and Derbyshire – and further afield in Yorkshire, Oxford and Somerset - displaying stars in their windows as a symbol of unity and strength. To show they were Locked down but not Knocked down – and celebrating the role played by independent businesses in their local communities.

Share the Light: Matlock, Derbyshire

As we approach autumn/ winter 2022 our times continue to be turbulent and unpredictable. And as we face ongoing challenges, we continue to explore how both our products and projects can be used to bring communities together and make people happy.

Here’s some links to some of the wonderful people we’ve been lucky enough to work with:

Charity helps to “share the light” this Christmas — Harrogate Informer (harrogate-news.co.uk)

Brightly-coloured lanterns appear around Chesterfield - Derbyshire Live (derbytelegraph.co.uk)

We wish everyone all the best as we look to the future. Love and Light.