I’ve had this plaster cast advertising Black & White whisky since I was nine or 10, so it has been in my possession for almost 50 years. At school, I had a friend whose parents took over an old off-licence and it was sitting on a shelf in the cellar, dusty and abandoned. He said I could have it, so I took it home. I see it as my first creative lesson: a playful item that wasn’t a toy, but was somehow exciting as a piece of marketing.
It was used as a doorstop in my parents’ home until one day it fell forward and broke into pieces. I loved it so much I glued it badly back together (pre-kintsugi!) and coloured in all the cracks on the black dog with marker pen. The poor white dog has been missing his ear since that fateful occasion, and the figurine has sat on a mantelpiece out of harm’s way in every house I’ve lived in since.
My lifelong love of quirky, kitsch packaging and products should come as no surprise just by looking at the Webber Street office shelves [in The Conran Shop’s headquarters] and the mantelpiece of my London flat. These cute dogs live permanently in my Nottingham home (with the real ones – my shih-tzu/poodle cross brothers, Edgar and Norman), but on their first long journey to London for this shoot, they broke again. The black dog lost his head along the old fracture lines, primarily due to decades-old glue and a decidedly amateur repair job on my juvenile part.
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I was philosophical: would I enjoy touching up years of scratches with model enamel and cotton buds? Hell yes. It now looks much fresher, albeit still fragile, and ready for the next 50 years. @stephenbriars1; conranshop.com
