Turn Key Blog. Things we've done and the things we love.

Last week saw the launch event for one of our newest (and cutest!) PR clients, Cootchie-Coo , an adorably chic childrenswear boutique situated in Leeds’ decadent Victoria Quarter.

Our PR team was tasked with managing the event, inviting key media and the region’s favourite mummy bloggers, whilst ensuring the evening ran to schedule and champagne glasses were filled! With some gorgeous nibbles supplied by in hand, guests were encouraged to wet their appetites for the store, spending some time browsing the beautiful designer ranges including a bespoke collection of christening garments created by the region’s favourite wedding dress designer, Anita Massarella . Guests were also shown around the boutique’s unique children’s photography studio, which is managed by Joseph Photography.

As no event is complete without a celebrity or two, Emmerdale stars Kelli Hollis and Natalie Robb also stopped by to show their support for the store, as well as Apprentice finalist and new mum, Claire Young.

As guests left with a balloon and cupcake, it was clear to see the evening was a great success, uncovering Cootchie-Coo as one of the city’s newest hidden gems on the independent retail scene.

You can keep up with all things Cootchie-Coo by liking the boutique on or following the store on . You can also view the full gallery of from the official launch event.

Here at Turn Key, we love a good party. Not too long ago we weren’t just invited to a good party, but a great one. In fact, it was bloomin’ spectacular! Our longstanding client and UK events specialists, Dine , was celebrating its 15 ^th birthday and boy did they put on an event to remember.

Guests were promised a lavish evening full of surprises and it was certainly that! As we arrived at The Mansion in our ‘glamorous’ attire (this was the theme for the evening) we were handed Rhubarb Kir Royales to drink as we mingled in the Collonades Room. As we chatted to some of Dine’s lovely clients and suppliers, waiters worked the room with some of Dine’s inventive canapés that even Heston Blumenthal would have been blown away by!

We munched on Wild Mushroom Arancinis, sipped back Treacle Cured Scottish Salmon & Oriental Dressing, injected sweet chilli sauce into our prawn tempuras and picked Wild Garlic & Carrot Veloutes from an edible ‘Roundhay Park’ garden.

When one of the waitresses began to sing in the middle of the room, we were a little confused, however what followed was a surprise flash mob performed by a very talented group of dancers and singers disguised in Dine uniforms!

As Harry Gration (yes, you read right, Harry Gration!), called us through to dinner, we ascended the staircase with impatience. We were seated in the beautiful Mansion Room and served a delicious four-course meal of local food and a specially chosen wine per course. As the meal drew to a close, we sipped on our ports as X Factor singer, Carolynne Poole, stood up to perform. Harry Gration then took to the microphone to kick off the charity slave auction, calling our very own MD Nik to the stage. After a very close bidding war, Nik accepted the bids of two very generous businessmen who have each won an in depth marketing workshop at our HQ!

Dine’s birthday event raised a whopping £16,540 for charity, which is being split between the Leeds Community Foundation and the MS Society . A big thank you to the Dine team for inviting us along to celebrate and support and to Joel Skingle Photography who took gorgeous food photographs below.

Our studio team abandoned their Macs last week to head over to Small Town Ink . Turn Key’s Junior Art Director, Jac , explains what the day was about and the insights the team took away from it…

The Small Town Ink Traditional Print Day took place last Wednesday (24 ^th April) in the Grass Studio at the University of Leeds. It was a celebration of and an education in traditional print techniques, giving young designers (and some ever so slightly older ones) a chance to get their hands dirty and ask questions with those who work with traditional print on a day-to-day basis.

The Traditional Print Day provided the TK studio with a much needed excuse to step away from our computers and see what some of the more experimental printers are doing with letterpress and other print techniques. Letterpress is a traditional relief printing technique in which the printer creates the print plate using individual type that is locked in place (see image below). The printer then rolls ink on the plate and presses the plate on to the page to transfer the ink.

There was some fantastic work on display including a varied offering of zines (small circulation magazines using low tech printing techniques) from Footprint . We were very lucky to make it in time for talks from The Print Project and Richard Lawrence , who were both inspiring and educational. Richard Lawrence gave an exceptional talk on the intricacy of traditional print which was very useful especially as letterpress has recently been making a much-deserved comeback!

A big thank you to Small Town Ink for a brilliant day, we’ve picked up a few tips that will make life easier for our printers and add value for our clients. We also spotted a few unusual techniques that create visually interesting print and will help to complement our work. Here’s a few of the photos we took on the day…

At Turn Key, we’ve been working with Leeds-based law firm, Blacks Solicitors , for a number of years. We’ve developed a strong brand for the firm which we, and the team at Blacks, are extremely proud of. The solicitors have become renowned in the region for their famous circular yellow logo which is used across all marketing collateral against a black background to really grab attention.

We’ve designed several high quality marketing documents for Blacks over the years. However, recently the team came to us with a challenge – “what can we use to house our collateral?”

Blacks required a branded folder to carry all the materials and paperwork the team give to past, present and prospective clients. But it needed to be different, something extra special that represented quality, reflecting the excellent services on offer. So we came up with something superior, sleek and, let’s face it, just plain sexy…

The new Blacks folders are the epitome of simplistic, printed in matte black onto high quality 380gsm Argowiggins Curious Skin stock to give a unique finish. The iconic Blacks logo, finished in a Gloss Yellow foil, peeks through a large circular hole on the front cover.

The inside cover holds a silver ink with a die cut business card holder for the team to personalise. We also abandoned the usual opening mechanism, instead choosing a magnetic closing to give a minimal, clean and high quality finish.

The team at Blacks is really pleased with the finished result and so are we. Check out the photographs below and let us know what you think…

Last month, Charlotte Oldroyd, mother of two and founder of Cootchie-coo.com approached us to help with the PR around the launch of her new childrenswear boutique in the Victoria Quarter .

The online boutique, which stocks designer brands from across the world, including Bonnie Baby , No Added Sugar and Beauty & The Bib really took off and following its success, Charlotte decided to open a shop in the heart of Leeds.

With just a week between Charlotte being handed the keys and opening the shop to the public, time was of the essence!

We quickly got to work on creating a ‘buzz’ online around the opening through Cootchie-Coo’s social media channels. We posted videos of the shop under construction, snapped the joiners (hard) at work and teased other pictures all to build up anticipation around the exciting new launch!

Ongoing PR around the launch is underway with an official VIP media launch event being held in May – watch this space!

Head over to , or – to join the community!

It’s been a busy time at Turn Key of late as we pulled together the Spring Lookbook for Eden Shopping Centre . This year’s publication was a 12-page mini-magazine aimed at men and women over 30 – our fashion team put their heads together to come up with something truly eye-catching.

Through dazzling design, impressive imagery and creative copy, the lookbook showcases some of the most up-and-coming spring trends and where shoppers can find them at Eden. As well as the latest mens and women’s clothing and accessories, this year’s mini-mag also features beauty must-haves and Eden events and entertainment with a scrapbook-style design.

The final designs have been printed and distributed to over 75,000 shoppers in and around High Wycombe. We’ve had some lovely feedback so far – what do you think?

At the end of last year, we were asked by The Drum to put our heads together and design not one, but two front pages. The designs were to be considered for the covers of The Drum’s final March issue and the Design 100 supplement – an amazing opportunity for us to show off our creativity.

The brief was very open, we were tasked to come up with a concept which communicated the theme of ‘design’.

After a lot of brainstorming from the entire studio team and an X Factor style audition process, two ideas were ‘shortlisted’ by our Creative Director, Rich – Oliver ’s ‘mindblowing design’ and Sean ’s ‘strain on the designer’ concept.

We arranged a photoshoot to turn these scamps into reality and spent the afternoon with Steve Sharp photographing our very own model (Oliver!) and props (pencils and cigarettes). Oliver and Sean then worked their magic, retouching the images and designing everything up to reflect what they’d initially envisaged.

The Drum chose to feature Oliver’s two-part cover concept and were so pleased with the two options we sent over that they’re banking Sean’s design for a future issue (but we’ll blog about that later!)

The magazine came out today (Friday 29 ^th March) and we’re thrilled with how it looks. Here’s what our Web (yes web!) Designer Oli has to say about the process:

“As a Web Designer I’m not used to doing magazine covers but this was something I was really looking forward to getting stuck into.

“Rather than coming up with two completely different designs for both The Drum covers, I wanted to make two concepts that you could piece together. So I thought it would be a nice idea to span a designer’s body across both covers.

“Firstly I used the torso for the main cover. I wanted to come up with a strong message for the t-shirt, and after much deliberation we came up with “The earth without art is just eh”.

“Then for the Design 100 cover, I used the head. I wanted to come up with a concept that resembled the creativity/thoughts of the Top 100 agencies in the UK. The hardest challenge was creating the Design 100 typography made purely from cigarette smoke.

“Overall it was a really fun project to work on, especially because I got to star in the photoshoot as well as help direct it!”

Check out our behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot with Steve Sharp and the finished covers…

This year’s Crypt Factor event took place last week and our girl band, Spice Aloud , did TK proud. We were one of nine acts to perform on the night to raise money for St. George’s Crypt and LionHeart .

The day leading up to our performance didn’t go without fault. Emma ‘Ginger’ Stanham forgot her iconic Union Jack dress which resulted in some stressful phonecalls back to the office and the group worrying that this was a bad omen for the evening ahead! Following a disastrous karaoke performance a few months back, expectations were now high with one of the other acts proclaiming ‘word on the street is, you girls got good!’

We spent the day rehearsing at the pavilion at Elland Road, feeling fairly confident until the vast space started filling up with over 700 people. Suddenly, all those hours of practice seemed to be forgotten and we went quiet with nerves, watching the other acts show off on stage.

When it came to our turn, we took some deep breaths and walked on stage, microphone stands in hand, to do our rendition of a Wannabe/Sound of the Underground mash-up. The giggles from the audience got us into the spirit of the event and we ended up doing our best performance yet. Our smiles were bigger than ever before and our dance (choreographed by TK’s very own Nicole Levings whose screams could be heard across the room!) went flawlessly. The audience clapped along and there were some very loud cheers coming from a few tables in particular as we finished up.

Although there were some crude comments about our outfits, the judges had nothing but praise for our ‘well-rehearsed’ performance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be though and, despite our lovely feedback, we didn’t make it through to the final round. The final three acts performed again and, after a vote from the crowd, the winning act was revealed as Dawn Allen from Pinsent Masons who stunned the audience with Kelly Rowland’s ‘When Love Takes Over’.

Despite not making the final, we were thrilled with the response and had a fantastic evening. The event raised over £50,000 – which is £20,000 more than last year’s record! The general consensus has been that it was the best Crypt Factor ever and we were very pleased to be a part of it. Thank you to all the organisers, judges and guests and well done to all the other acts.

Our Senior Developer, Andrew Markham-Davies gives some helpful advice on how to stay secure online…

10 minutes.

That’s all the time it takes for a brute force attack to crack your password if it contains up to six lowercase letters.

Now that’s pretty damn quick.

Add a few more letters and some upper case characters to your password and you’ve just increased the time it would take to crack to over a  year. And you’d have to be very determined to spend that kind of time hacking a site!

Having a secure presence on the web is more than avoiding the word “password” as your password to secure your personal data (although, “password” IS the most popular password in use!) It’s all about taking basic steps when building websites and online applications to protect your company, and the data of your users.

Both web users and online companies need to do their part to ensure the highest level of protection of our data.

As users, we can make our passwords hard to crack so that brute force attacks are more likely to fail. As builders and owners of websites, we need to ensure that when we get our users’ data, we take all steps needed to protect it from scamps who might want to steal it.

Luckily for the website user, it’s not difficult to make sure your details are as safe as possible online, you just need to stick to a few simple rules…

• Don’t use dictionary words for passwords. Any hacking programs will go through dictionary words first in an attempt to hack into accounts. So keep clear of names, days of the week and greetings

• Avoid any obvious keyboard combinations, such as 123456, 098765 or qwerty, as these are also the first combinations a hacking program will try

• If you need to use something that’s memorable, mix it up with upper and lowercase letters and numbers. For example, “molly” is a weak password (4% on password strength scores), but “M011y1983″ scores 100%. Much, much stronger but still easy to remember (assuming the 1983 means something significant)

• Rate your own passwords online to check their strength

• If you’re having issues with coming up with a strong password, use a generator such as this . It will help you generate a strong password, which will avoid all the most popular words and combinations to ensure your password is secure

• Finally, don’t use the same passwords for all your accounts. This can be tricky, as no one wants to remember several different passwords along with everything else we have to remember in our lives, but taking the time to do this can pay off. Plus, saving the hassle of changing all your passwords because one online service got hacked/compromised, will be more than worth it in the long run

So much of our lives are now managed online, from the money in our banks to our social connections. With so much at stake, taking the time to observe some simple guidelines is time well spent.

At Turn Key we take the security of our clients very seriously. My job is to make sure the basics in web security are not missed out, from taking daily database back-ups of our clients’ content, to ensuring our clients are provided strong passwords to administer their CMS areas. I make sure we are doing our part, in making the web secure for our clients and their customers.

We are very pleased to announce we are entering a band into this year’s Crypt Factor event. Turn Key’s Spice Aloud will be the competition’s FIRST EVER girl band and will hopefully give the other acts a run for their money!

On Thursday 21 ^st March, TK’s Samara ‘Scary’ Bott, Gina ‘Posh’ Reay, Emma ‘Ginger’ Stanham,  Leanne ‘Baby’ Bayston and Rachel ‘Sporty’ Phipps will grace the stage of the Leeds charity event which sees singers and groups compete against each other at for the top spot. The property sector’s answer to The X Factor, the annual event is held at Elland Road and will be attended by over 600 guests, raising tens of thousands of pounds for two charities, St. George’s Crypt and Lion Heart .

The rehearsal schedule is intense, the band will be singing a mash-up of two girl band classics and learning a newly choreographed dance routine, put together by our very own Nicole ! The digital team’s Olivia has been busy organising costumes and Leanne S will be taking care of hair and make-up – so it’s very much a Turn Key team effort.

Here’s a sneak peek at what’s been going on so far. We hope to see as many of you as possible on the night, so if you ‘wannabe’ there, contact Natalia Hannan by email: or telephone: .

You can follow our progress on Twitter ( ) and keep checking the blog for updates – only two weeks to go now!

Here’s a little look at some of the snaps from our photoshoot…

And finally the band’s official group shot!