The Outer Hebrides are significantly further west than Land’s End, but with themes of peat, fish and wild woolly sheep there are plenty of better marketing messages available than mere west-ish-ness.
1. Tweed With An Extra Twist
What do you think of when you think of tweed? Stiff scratchy skirts worn by country women of a certain age? Or soft engaging quietly coloured fabrics that make great curtains, cushions, furnishing fabrics, and of course temptingly-priced gifts that you can give to your aunt of a certain age?
Top marks to Harris Tweed for the combination of a) having a very nice range of material indeed b) having a large shop in Tarbert conveniently close to what would be the main coach route in non-covid times, and c) making things with tweed that don’t need to be tried on in covid times and which are eminently suitable for the AOACA, especially when the purchase is eased by the offer of a small discount.
However we come to the challenge of the double brand-stretch of using St Kilda. There is scant evidence that the wiry, puffin-bashing, fulmar-harvesting, subsistence-farming St Kilda inhabitants who eventually asked to be evacuated from their homes in about 1930, ever had a use for a purse like this. Still, Bothy says the “Never Let The Truth Get In The Way Of A Good Story” award was intended for items exactly like this.
2. “Eat Drink Hebrides”
With its claim to be “the official food and drink trail of the Outer Hebrides”, Bothy scents a schism. Is this a rival offering to the signs we see for the “Outer Hebrides Food Trail”?
As observed in Orkney, it can be hard to get a lot of small businesses to cooperate, and it looks like this is a weaker contender for the “Herding Hand-Crafted Cats” award than the Orkney Creative Trail. Which is a shame, because souvenirs from this one could be more popular with your friends, although less likely to get home intact if you have packed them near the picnic in the back of your Mini.
Bothy thought it might be a bit tasteless to rename this the “Herding Home-Cooked Cats” award.
3. McBreakfast Goods
As you may know, Sid and Doris come from Bishop’s Stortford, and as you may not know, Bishop’s Stortford narrowly escaped being in Essex through a bit of natty boundary adjustment. So Sid and Doris feel a connection to Essex, and in particular to one of its most successful export brands, Tiptree. Out-jamming Dundee, Tiptree has mastered putting small quantities of jam and marmalade into little jars and selling them wholesale at under 25p per jar.
Proud contenders for the “It’s Not From Round Here But We Don’t Care” award, Tiptree jam and Lakeland butter (from, mysteriously, Ireland), have been a constant feature round the whole route so far.
Along with Cole and Lewis bathroom products, inexplicably. Bothy can understand that the logistics of pouring boiling hot jam into tiny little jars affordably requires skill and scale, but surely it should be possible to put peat-flavoured shampoo into little plastic bottles more locally?
4. McProper Pizza
The problem with pizza is that sometimes it can be a bit… well… foreign.
So the corollary of the previous award is the “This Is How It Should Be Done” award for taking some sort of foreign muck and rendering it suitable for local tastes. Chicken Tikka Massala has done it for the English, and here is pizza being done properly for the Scots.
5. Barratlantic
Bothy enjoys a pun as much as the next ageing uncle, but he always has an eye to commercial success too.
Which is why the sight of four or more Barratlantic transport lorries, trucks and courier vans on the jetty in the dawn at Barra gladdened his little heart with its slightly hardening arteries, and got them nominated for the “Boom Boom Mr Derek!” brand wordplay award, sponsored by Basil Brush(™).