Can Apps Help Us All to be Happier? Reblogged from She Owns It

“It’s the little moments that make life big”

This week Stylist magazine claimed there were 10 scientifically proved things that actually make us unhappy, the first one? Facebook. A study by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross last year found a direct correlation between time spent on the social media site and feelings of dissatisfaction, loneliness and isolation. The average time spent on Facebook per user every day is around 30 minutes, with some spending up to eight hours a day at the call of the addictive Facebook newsfeed… that’s a lot of unhappiness right there.

The idea of consciously striving to make social media a positive, meaningful and mobile experience is something we find very exciting. We have excitedly watched the Happier Inc. app grow in 2013 to hundreds of thousands of users sharing happy moments every day with each other. The app encourages users to record happy moments or things they are grateful for each day with an emphasis on being happier in the moment.

  

Even the most tiny things can bring happiness, from the sun shining through your bedroom window, to having five minutes to yourself after a busy week and these can be recorded in the Happier app and added to collections for you to look back on. The science behind the app is solid and straightforward; expressing gratitude has been shown to do more than improve your mood. People who write down a few positive things about their day are healthier, more energetic, less stressed, less anxious and sleep better. We have actively used Happier for more than a year now and we can honestly say it really does makes us happier! We are absolutely rooting for the future of the platform and the team behind it, especially co-founder Nataly Cogan who we interviewed on our blog recently.

We aim to add to the happiness movement with the launch of our new lifestyle app; Countdown Keeper – Collect Moments, Not Things. Studies have shown that anticipating future events is an important source of happiness and so we wanted to create an app that highlights those happy moments every day in a meaningful and useful way. 

Having something to look forward to, enjoying the moment, sharing the pleasure with others to heighten the experience and then reflecting on moments make even the smallest of experiences even better. Countdown Keeper allows you to get excited about upcoming events in one place, record memories through images and notes and then share the experience again with friends.

Our app is a customisable and shareable iPhone app which has been thoughtfully designed to include a number of features. Users can add images to further personalise count downs from the built-in image library, Camera, Camera Roll or Facebook. Once events have been created users can share count downs through a number of services such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and add them to the iPhone calendar too. After the count down event arrives, the app automatically switches to counting the time since that event allowing users to collect, and look back on, memories.

Download the free app for iOS today from the App Store here http://bit.ly/1iCxa4c or search ‘Countdown Keeper’

Since its release there have been thousands of downloads and a raft of five star reviews, from users who particularly love the simple interface and design. UK singer Lily Allen enjoyed Countdown Keeper’s count down to her new album release ‘Sheezus’ retweeting it to her 4.6 million Twitter followers!

You can visit the App Store to download Countdown Keeper for free today, and if you like the app, we’d be so grateful if you could leave a review to help others find it too, and join us onTwitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest by using the hashtag #collectmoments

Instead of heading towards the Facebook app when you have some downtime today, why not try one of these popular apps and see if your mood improves… have a happy day!

See this original blog post on She Owns It where we are featured contributors - A popular blog in the US to celebrate, support and connect women entrepreneurs!

Katie x

For the Knackered Cows & Grumpy Bullocks Out There… A Cowshed Full of Christmas Gifts!

Born in a shed in 1999, Cowshed has quickly expanded from a spa set in the gorgeous surroundings of Babington House in Somerset to a suite of global store locations all over the world offering natural and honest bath, body and skincare products.

With British heritage still very much at the heart of all Cowshed products, every thing is created using the very best organic, wild crafted and fairly-traded plant extracts and essential oils. The team at Cowshed believe that there are few things in life better than an English country garden, and we wholeheartedly agree!

      

Each of the products carry playful names including Knackered Cow, Moody Cow, Grumpy Cow, Lazy Cow, Gorgeous Cow and many more cheeky ones, allowing customers to shop by mood. This enables the products to work on enhancing moods with formulations built on thoughtful scents, mood-lifting colours, botanical ingredients, indulgent textures and herbal remedies.

Cowshed offers a huge variety of indulgent treats for the body, but you can also browse their Living & Home section including handy travel products and colourful notebooks, or if you want to try an organic baby range, check out their cute Baby Cow products too. 

With Christmas gifts in mind as we are approaching the festive month of December, we thought we’d share our top picks, and better still each of the products we’ve picked are included in the Cowshed 20% discount for Christmas!

If you are tired of the traditional Christmas cracker, why not shake it up a bit this year and try the Cracking Cow, a cracker filled with two little Cowshed bath & shower treats, this could also work for a fun stocking filler too!

If you know someone who is on-the-go a lot for work, why not treat them with this gorgeous travel candle gift set, to set the mood in the hotel room after a long day! The scents include Knackered Cow for relaxation, Wild Cow for invigoration and soothing Lazy Cow.

Upgrade the Lynx aftershave gift set this year to the cheekily named Bullocks for Men Duo Set, ideal for a man in your life that could benefit from a little grooming. He needs to know the set includes a ‘Bracing Body Wash’ and a ‘Soothing Moisturiser’, you need to know it’s enriched with Essential Oils of pettigrain and grapefruit to revitalise with hemp seed to soothe and restore. 

To see the full range of Cowshed products, click on any of our images above or head to their website here. You can also find out all the happenings in the ‘shed’ over at the Cowshed blog too! 

We love that one of our favourite Birmingham eating spots, Fleet Street Kitchen stock the bathrooms with Cowshed products only; it really makes a difference and adds an extra special touch to the overall experience. To find out more about the new trendy restaurant in the heart of Birmingham you can visit their website here.

Katie x

20% Off Our eCourse 'Create an Effective Facebook Strategy' Plus a Fun New Competition!

We blogged last week about our first SkillShare eCourse 'Create an Effective Facebook Strategy' and we're excited to let you know that it's now live on SkillShare for just $23/£14!

SkillShare is a fantastic global website where you can discover new and interesting courses to take at your own pace through video lessons, powerpoints, audio and project tasks. Each class finishes with a final project where students can display their skills and get practical feedback from the teachers.

The final project on our eCourse asks students to complete a full Facebook strategy after being carefully guided by us through six lessons; the power of social media, Facebook's key features, Facebook guidelines, Facebook audits, social media evaluations and finally, strategy. By the end of the eCourse you'll have your strategy, you'll understand how to evaluate your presence and also how to audit yourself and your competitors.

Our eCourse is packed with 12 video lessons (you'll see our faces a lot!) where we bring our real-life social media experience and knowledge to you. We wanted to make the eCourse as fun as possible so students who complete the eCourse and upload their final project will be entered into our competition to win an online social media advice session with us both worth £150!

Until the 26th November we also have 20% off the eCourse so there's no better time to sign-up! Remember, you don't have a time limit to complete the course so you can work at your own pace and still benefit from the 20% reduction. Although to be in with the chance of winning the competition, you need to upload your project before the end of the year.

Follow the link: http://skl.sh/182SQmb and use the code: KJFB20 to get your discount today!

If you have any questions about the eCourse tweet us at @janiexx or @KatieAMcD or email us at smile@katieandjane.com

Enjoy!

Jane x

Not on the High Street - The Perfect Place for Unique Gift Ideas

Around this time of year my mind turns to finding the perfect Christmas presents for my friends and family. I like to really think about what gift each individual would really love. I think the perfect present doesn't need to be expensive or lavish but it does need to be thoughtfully tailored to them. Saying that, it does take a lot of effort to pick gifts in this way but that's where Not on the High Street comes in! 

I found this site a few years ago while searching for items that could be personalised and have been a regular visitor ever since. One of my latest buys was for my best friend's birthday - a spice cooking kit containing all the ingredients to make a three-course meal delivered to her door every month! She's just moved into her first home so I thought she could treat us when we visit! One of my favourite gifts is a personalised picture we brought for my fiancés auntie’s wedding - whilst in Australia we simply emailed the seller a picture of her beautiful wedding venue and picked the frame. The seller then sketched the venue finishing it off with the bride and grooms names and wedding date - they loved it!

The founders of Not on the High Street, Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, have been an inspiration to me after reading their joint book 'Build a Business from Your Kitchen Table'. They started their business in 2006 with the mission to find the most original items from the best creative small businesses and bring them together in one place. Not on the High Street was literally devised from their kitchen table which they say they still have in one of their meeting rooms! It is one of the UK's fastest growing e-commerce businesses and in just seven years they've gone from having 100 small businesses on board to thousands of creatives. Very inspirational!

The reason I love and use Not on the High Street so much is that it's a very easy way to buy perfect presents for any occasion. The website is beautifully designed to show off the latest products yet very easy to use with items grouped into home, fashion, pets, etc. with each group broken down into recipient, occasion, personality (love this!) and category such as experiences, hampers, ribbon and wrap and sweet treats.

The other reason I'm such a big fan of Not on the High Street is that by buying from them, I am supporting British independent businesses as everything comes directly from one of the creatives who make up their collection of sellers.

The one bad thing about Not on the High Street is that there are so many unique and gorgeous products to buy, it's easy to get carried away! But, with Christmas fast approaching at least I have an excuse to browse and buy, maybe throwing in a few things for myself!

I've picked out a small collection of items I adore from the newest arrivals on Not on the High Street...

Enjoy shopping! Jane x

Personalised Pet Bowl by ADRA - Beau is in need of a new bowl and this will suit him down to the ground!

Stamp Your Own Cookies Kit by STOMPSTAMPS - I love to give a little Christmas hamper filled with homemade goodies to family members and this year, they can be personalised! 

Personalised Child Story Book by LOSTMY.NAME - My nephew will be learning to read soon so this is the perfect Christmas present to help him along and bring the story to life. 

Personalised Tape Sequin or Snow Bauble by THE LETTEROOM - I think The Letteroom is my favourite seller having brought a number of personalised items from them before. These Christmas decorations really jumped out at me... I have to have them for their uniqueness and bright neon colours! 

Moleskine - The Legendary Notebook

I thought Moleskine was one of those classic brands that has been around for centuries so I was surprised to discover that notebooks were only brought back to life in 1997 by a small publisher based in Milan. It's the timeless story behind the legendary Moleskine notebook that goes back hundreds of years...

There once was a nameless simple black rectangular notebook with rounded corners, an elastic page-holder and an internal expandable pocket that was used by artists and thinkers including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. This notebook was created by a small French bookbinder in Paris and became a trusted travel companion of the greats. It was English novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin who named his favourite notebook 'moleskine' and despite all the popularity, in the 1980s, the small family-owned company went out of business and these notebooks were no more.

Sixteen years ago the notebooks were brought back to life and the company fittingly called the brand 'Moleskine'. Today, the name is synonymous with travel, imagination and memories in the real and digital world with their notebooks, diaries and journals, bags, writing instruments and reading accessories, making the brand loved by millions the world over - including me!

Although I love the fun, colourful stationery lines of Australian stationers, Kikki.K when I am looking for a more classic, substantial notebook, it's off to Moleskine I go. I don't hide the fact that the brand is one of my 'best things in life' - see our blog post on the subject here. Not only can you get simple, gorgeously bound lined, plain and squared notebooks, journals and diaries of all different sizes, I adore the ranges of limited edition collections, creativity, themed and travel notebooks.

Moleskine’s unique 'Themed' range features an extensive number of journals from dessert journals to baby journals, film journals to style journals. That brings me onto one of my favourite products which I featured as my 'top pick' for August - the Moleskine Wellness Journal. Read all about it on our 'Products We Love' page.

Next on my list of stationery to lust after (yes I am that sad!) is from Moleskine's 'Limited Edition' collection; an Evernote Smart Notebook. The notebook uses Evernote's Page Camera to capture the pages of the notebook! It then allows you to organise notes through Smart Stickers and Smart Tagging as the icons become searchable - great for those (like me) who love to be organised!

Moleskine's website is stationery heaven and I urge you to have a look. Not only at the vast array of quality products but they engage really well with online consumers. I particularly like the way they promote the Moleskine app by posting tweets from users on the website.

Now... I must stop looking before I get too carried away!

Jane x

Cachette: An Online 'Hiding Place' Filled With Memory Makers!

Cachette is an online store offering beautiful and unusual products designed to their simplest perfection. The products are a mix of timeless, modern and vintage finds for design lovers in search of simple, but meaningful pieces. 

Cachette is the creation of Stephen and Delphine an Anglo-French couple who left London for the appeal of the beautiful twisting streets of Le Cannet in France and established Cachette in 2012.

From home interiors, kitchen accessories and handmade gifts to fine gourmet food and a small children's range, Cachette is a brand that is passionate about shining the spotlight on young designers and unknown artisans, much like the inspiration behind another favourite brands Not on the High Street. Online, you’ll find a gorgeous selection of items that have resonated with Stephen and Delphine in some way, in the hope that you will love this happy mix of simple, but functional products as much as they do.   

Regularly featured in some of our favourite glossy magazines including Living Etc, House & Garden and Country Homes & Interiors, Cachette was awarded as one of the Top 20 Online Interior Shops by the Sunday Times and more recently featured at number three in Elle Decoration’s list of The 21 Best Online Shops.

Cachette means 'hiding place' and the duo’s mission is to sell things of simple beauty that have an everyday use within the home, a wealth of hidden gems just waiting to be found. You can see the appearance of this in their intentionally simple, but stunning photography which exudes calmness and stillness with pops of colour here and there.

One of the best parts of the site is the food section (of course!) which presents a range of carefully selected food items including champagne vinegar from Reims in Champagne,  olive oil made with Taggiasca Olives and sea salt flakes from Sicily - a perfect place to find a special gift for someone who loves food.  

I love the unusual products that Cachette offers, and when browsing through the site I kept stumbling across items that seem to transport the imagination to a memory you would very much like to have! This is exactly why I chose this gorgeous heart-warming log torch to create an instant cosy outdoor fire during the chilly September evenings. You can find more of our top picks here.

Discover your favourite Cachette items on their website here and join them over on Facebook too.

Click on any of the images above to see the products in more detail, plus you can Get 15% off everything in Cachette Food with code UTDHG until 16/9/13

Enjoy!

Katie x