It’s been a sad time at Hannah Zakari lately. Our dear friend John was in an accident and sadly passed away just a few weeks ago. Many of you will be aware that John played an important part in HZ and has been hugely instrumental in our success since the very start.

This Friday 7th June is his funeral and we’ve taken the decision to close the shop for the day so that all the HZ crew can attend and say goodbye to a wonderful person who we will miss so much.

We hope our customers understand our decision to do this and hope it doesn’t cause anyone too much inconvenience.

Rachael x

What do you think of our dotty Valentines window? Hand dotted by our very own Verity Keniger?

All we need now are some cute couples to come and take advantage of the photo opportunity!

Isn’t it cute?!

Rachael xxx

Twitter friends may already know that I’ve been working on a little project with my friend Gill. We wanted to start something creative together and Totes Amazed was born!

If you haven’t guessed yet, Totes Amazed will be an online shop selling a range of wonderful tote bags curated by us and featuring many exclusive designs from some of our designer friends.

Ta! will launch on December 13th at a joint event at the Hannah Zakari Shoppe in Edinburgh, and you’ll be able to purchase online from then too. In the meantime you can keep up to date with what’s happening on our Ta! Tumbler and follow us on the Ta! Twitter.

If you know of any totes amazing tote bags you think we’d like to hear about let us know!

Rachael x

We’ve kept our free postage options for as long as we possibly could after the Great Royal Mail Price Increase of 2012, but I’m afraid we’ve decided that we will introduce a nominal postage charge as of next week.

Starting on Monday 10th September our postage prices will be £2.50 for Standard UK Postage and £4.50 for Airmail parcels.

Our prices for Express Postage within the UK will increase to £6.00 and for ‘International Signed For’ or ‘Airsure’ postage for orders travelling outside of the UK the cost will be £9.00.

Of course, this still means that you have time to order and take advantage of free postage over this weekend! Check out our What’s New? page for all the latest additions.

Rachael x

Talented artist, good friend and sometimes HZ shoppe girl, Cassandra Harrison has 2 (yes 2!) exhibitions opening up in Edinburgh this week. If you are in this beautiful city during August (apparently the population triples while the festival is on so there’s a slight chance you might be!) do go and take a look at her beautiful work.

Tomorrow night we’ll all be at Hula Juice Bar & Cafe for the opening of exhibition #1, scoffing their delicious wraps and sipping on rum punch whilst we get a preview of the specially commissioned works featuring some of the Grassmarkets finest views. The exhibition runs throughout August so get over there, grab a smoothie (my fave is the Betty Ford) and feel cultured as you look at art.

On Thursday we’ll be supporting Cassandra once more when she kicks of her exhibition at Urban Outfitters, again with some specially commissioned work. There’ll be DJs from Sneaky Petes and some lovely beer to drink. The exhibition is also on throughout August in the menswear department so go on over to UO (but do your shopping somewhere cooler and more indie!).

Originals and prints are available to buy at both venues and we’ll have a selection at the HZ shoppe too.

Rachael x

If you’ve been following me on Twitter then you’ll probably know that over the last few weeks John and I have been doing up the back of the shoppe. We’re finally close to finishing, and I’m pretty pleased with the results! I thought I’d share some images of the process…

This is how the back of our shop looked before Christmas, it was a bit cluttered to my eye, but xmas is a time of year when you want to be selling, so you need plenty of stuff to sell right! However, I’ve never been happy 100% with how the back of the shop looks and I was already thinking about plans for a revamp.

It didn’t take us long to go from that, to this…

and that big table you see in the first picture, well, we decided to saw it in half…

…but for a good reason! It was going to be the home for our new little type chest which we had cleaned up and planning to use as an art display cabinet.

Anyway, after much sawing, drilling, filling of holes, hammering, sanding, painting (5 coats!), etc etc, the shop is now looking like this…

So, uhh, yeah, we’ve been pretty busy! What do you think of it?

Rachael x

To all of our customers who have supported HZ over this last year, we truly appreciate it so this is our way of saying a big ‘THANK YOU!’.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

With love and thanks from Rachael and John at HZ x

Oh, PS, this is valid until January 4th!

Not long to go now until this crazy madness they call Christmas is over!

I thought I’d share our beautiful Christmas window display, made and installed by Jonathan Chapman aka the wonderful paper cut artist Mr Yen. The only problem with this is that I wish he could come and make our window look pretty all the time!

Jonathan arrived at the shoppe with a portfolio case full of work, ready to work his magic in time for our very first shopping event that evening which was a great success and a brilliant opportunity to show off the window.

I was so, so pleased with it, I hope you like it too…

And inside the shop, my washi tape xmas tree!

I’ve got some special zine blog posts coming up over the xmas hols, and keep your peepers on this blog for info about our website sale…

Rachael x

I feel like there’s a lot of ‘firsts’ happening at HZ lately, and here’s another – our very first in-shoppe shopping event! This is to say thank you to all the customers who have supported us at our wee shoppe over the last year and bit, and what better way to do it than with mince pies, mulled wine and discounts! And, you never know what other goodies we might be planning to *give away* on the night…

We’re also super excited about our window display installation by the wonderful paper artist, Mr Yen, who will be with us all day on the 21st November making our window all lovely and festive. Come and say hello and admire his work!

If you can’t make it to our shoppe, don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of nice xmassy things for our web shoppe customers to look forward to in the next few weeks, we would never leave you guys out of the fun!

Rachael x