Thank You Pauline - For 42 Glorious Years!

Larson-Juhl has been very lucky to have had marketing manager Pauline Hutchinson with us for 42 years – she has made an incredible contribution to the business for which we are hugely grateful. She will be a Larson-Juhl friend for life, and we wish her a long, happy and suntanned retirement!


Here is her story:
When I think back to my first day at Arquati (as the company was known in those days) in December 1978, we had one of the coldest winters for a long while. Invariably, living very locally, I was the only one who could make the journey into the office as the snow was so bad. Orders were taken over the phone when I joined, and hand written out. Our only computer initially was an accountancy machine for invoicing. Our range consisted of around 100 mouldings from the Arquati factory in Palma, Italy. Mountboard was a modest range of 20 colours most of which are still in the range today though the standards and quality have changed hugely. We also had a small range of swept and oval frames. Stocktaking was done manually with all staff using trollies and an adding up machine to manually count the lengths of moulding and packs of mountboard.

Computers arrived in 1980 but our six strong sales team still had to ring orders in from a phone box or send them by post!

Moulding ranges in the early years were very memorable. I remember a range by Arquati called Colourwood. Coloured layers of veneer in simple profiles but so different from the usual dark wood with a gold sight edge. Also, floral mouldings with a floral wrap around existing large profiles.

10,000 new products!

If I tried to count how many mouldings I’ve been involved in launching it would run into over 10,000 at a guess. I produced the very first catalogue back in 1990 and have been involved in every volume since!

Fun on the road

My first Spring Fair was in 1979. I only visited for the day and was blown away by the size of the show. Designing the stand for both Spring Fair and shows at the Alexandra Palace and Olympia were my favourite part of the job and I loved attending and getting to meet customers. We had a Sierra Cosworth on the stand at one show when we sponsored racing driver Gerry Mahney. All our sales team drove Sierra cars and I remember we had a photoshoot with Gerry and his car and all our sales team on the Silverstone racetrack, with me directing all the cars to make sure they were in the right place.

We’ve attended many exhibitions over the years, including Focus on Imaging, Picture Business Live, SACA Bologna, Index in Dubai, Bahrain, Qatar, Sign and Digital India, Homeware in Hong Kong, Photoforum Russia plus many, many, regional UK shows. I’m sure over the years these would total to more than 100!

I also took on the role as marketing manager for Conservation by Design for a few years which opened up yet more exhibitions dealing with museums, libraries and archives. Producing catalogues for CXD proved to be a major but interesting task.

So many customer and expert friends!

To talk about some of the customers who have made an impact on me and made my job such a pleasure I would have to start with Len Younger from Wessex. Len would turn up driving his van with one arm and load up with swept frames - he had many tales to tell at the same time.

Bernie Rose and Adrian Hollis in London were a couple of characters that made the Spring Fair shows so much fun as were the teams from De Montfort Fine Art, Washington Fine Art and Buckingham Fine Art. Those were the days when we served alcohol on our stand and after the show had finished at 6pm everyone would congregate on our stand and the drinks would flow before security had the task of getting us out of the hall. Then it was back to the hotel, a quick shower and change before hitting Birmingham and Ronnie Scott’s or a little Italian called Lorenzo’s that seemed to attract a lot of exhibitors.

Through our sponsorship of charities such as Willow Foundation, EAZL and Nordoff Robbins I’ve been very lucky to meet a lot of premier league footballers (wasted on me as I don’t always know who they are) and stars including Ricky Hatton who I thought was Wayne Rooney and asked him how Coleen was. Noel Gallagher was sitting next to him and couldn’t stop laughing. Realising my mistake I just wanted the ground to open up.


I’ve been very grateful for the services of our panel of experts over the years who include Mal Reynolds, Lynn Hall, David Wilkie and Jon Price. Special thanks go to Mal and Lyn as their expertise and friendship over the years has been invaluable. Jonathan has also been a great help more recently with his videos and helping Matt with his webinars.

There are so many customers who I’ve enjoyed working with including Dru and Chris from Ultimat who helped us launch our bevelled corner chevrons and many more including all our overseas customers that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at the shows.

Some people say how on earth have you managed to be with a company for so long. My answer is that I have loved every minute. Seeing the industry grow to where we are now has been a fun rollercoaster ride with so many highlights.
I can’t say goodbye without mentioning my team Cara and Alec. Cara has been working with me for over 25 years and Alec has been our framer for nearly 40 years. They have been brilliant at handling everything I’ve thrown at them and have been the best team to work with. Cara will now work with Matt fulfilling the marketing and sales support for Larson-Juhl. I’ll be sad to say goodbye to the rest of the staff especially Steve and the sales team along with all our office and warehouse staff - many of them who have been with the company for 30 plus years.

I hope to keep in touch with many of my framing friends – it has been the best job ever!