“The workshops run by Simon and Kiran were extremely valuable. My team felt it was the best training they’d had. It provided theory backed up by real examples, and processes that have given us a framework which is being used daily. Thank you very much”

Tesco

To answer the question “Why are you called Muse?”

A detail of the Doges Palace, Venice. Scene of a Muse conference presentation

Our name is Muse because of its meaning as a source of inspiration, and the value of inspiration to businesses.

But it also has classical references to quality and endurance, which are characteristics we seek in our output.

We didn’t want to be embarrassed by a transitory, fashionable name that didn’t reflect our values.

So the Doges Palace seemed an appropriate venue for us.

Someone told us it implied ‘old fashioned’.

Perhaps they lacked a bit of discernment?

The Penny Farthing is old fashioned. One of the world’s most iconic buildings isn’t. There is all the difference in the world between being permanently relevant and old fashioned.

We think that truth applies to brands every bit as much as it applies to bikes and buildings.

We’re in the heart of Soho, London, and so we’re in the heart of some of the most culturally influential and inspirational places in modern history. As one writer said:

“Soho needs to be seen to be believed, a beast unto itself, a stage fully dressed with a full cast of actors, professional or otherwise. By day, a warren of streets thronged with film directors, ad agency ‘ideas people’, Chinese porters, Booker Prize-winning novelists, sober ponces, nonces and fakers, Irish vagabonds trying to scrounge a penny to keep the wolf from the door, and everything in between. By night, a neon-lit labyrinth through which courses a virus, infecting tourists and barflies alike, a sickness that makes that one last drink never the final one of the evening and always the first of many more which will maroon a man in London’s heart until the birdsong of dawn, his braces looped by his knees, office eyes zombified, glazed by the debauch, strung out and skint, his wife back in the burbs already flicking through the local Yellow Pages for the numbers of family lawyers. And the hookers in the side street walk-ups, the kind you never see, but who keep the red lights burning in windows whose iodine curtains hang sadly with the scurf of a million johns.”

(The image at the top of the page is of the John Snow memorial, near our office. That groundbreaking, inspirational doctor traced the source of London’s cholera outbreak to the site of the memorial in 1854. It amuses us that the much better known memorial to him is the ‘John Snow’ pub, in the background!)