The Big Issue

The Big Issue was launched in 1991 by Gordon Roddick and A. John Bird in response to the growing number of rough sleepers on the streets of London.They believed that the key to solving the problem of homelessness lay in helping people to help themselves.Vendors buy their magazines with their own money and sell them at their own profit or loss.

Since its creation the Big Issue Foundation has provided services and referrals to address issues around housing, health, finances, education, employment and personal aspirations; helping Big Issue vendors to regain their independence and turn a livelihood into a life. In the last decade we have achieved over 40,000 positive outcomes with our vendors alone, life improving steps one and all.

In 2015 over 2000 Vendor’s achieved record levels of personal outcomes Our impactful, cost effective work included:

• teaching transferable sales and customer service skills
• enabling and advocating for decent accommodation, access to mainstream health care (something people who are homeless are often excluded from) and access to employment, training, education and volunteering
• facilitating the establishment of support networks made up of other The Big Issue vendors, customers and specialist service providers.

In addition nearly £11000 was awarded to over 200 vendors through vendor support fund grants. Vendors saved a minimum 20% contribution towards these grants in keeping with our self-help ethos. Vendors took part and raised funds in many of our events, wrote content for this website and represented our work at various functions.

Old Spice : Initial Research

The first Old Spice® product, called Early American Old Spice for women, was introduced in 1937, closely followed by Old Spice for men in 1938. The Old Spice products were manufactured by the Shulton Company that was founded in 1934 by William Lightfoot Schultz.

Back in the the 1930’s, Schultz was inspired by the scent of his mother’s rose jar and began experimenting in the development of his own fragrances.

The trademark Old Spice scent for men was an instant hit and the company became big rapidly. Its major success came in men’s products market and it launched various popular scents like York Town, Old Spice Lime and Blue Stratos.

In the early 1940s, when the packaging moved to glass bottles, T. C. Wheaton Glass Company created specially designed cream colored glass bottles that mimicked the appearance of pottery to continue with same design.

After World War II concluded, Schultz relocated it’s manufacturing factory to New Jersey before passing away in 1950. 

His son George Schultz took over the company and served as the President for 20 years before selling the company to American Cyanamid in 1970.

By 1970, the annual sales had reached $130 million and keeping in mind the need for larger scales of production and capital, the company was sold to American Cynamide.

American Cyanamid held on to the company for another 20 years before selling the brand to Procter and Gamble in 1990.

When P&G bought the company, they replaced the clipper ship on the bottles with a yatch. The packaging underwent another change in 2008, with the glass bottles being replaced by plastic and the stoppers turning red.

Procter and Gamble rebranded Old Spice, donated product to 5th graders who didn’t need the product yet, and began to reshape the way Old Spice was perceived. 20 years later in 2010, Old Spice launched the video ads with “the Old Spice Guy” and the brand continues on.

Early American Old Spice was developed around a colonial theme. When Old Spice was introduced, William Lightfoot Schultz was interested in maintaining a colonial framework for those products and chose a nautical theme for Old Spice. Thus, sailing ships, in particular colonial sailing ships, were used as a trademark. Through continuous use and advertising, the various ships have become a valuable trademark identifying the Old Spice product for men. 

Shelter : Initial Research

HISTORY: 
Shelter is a registered charity that helps millions of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through their advice, support and legal services. They also campaign to make sure that, one day, no one will have to turn to them for help; freeing England and Scotland from the problems of homelessness.

Shelter was founded in England in 1966 by the Reverend Bruce Kenrick, who was horrified by the state of the tenements round his Notting Hill parish. Later came the setting up of Shelter Scotland followed in 1968.

Kenrick had formed the Notting Hill Housing Trust three years earlier to provide decent, affordable houses to rent in the area.

As slums proliferated in the inner cities, homeless families were forced into overcrowded hostels, and notorious landlords like Peter Rachman made the headlines, Kenrick saw the need for a national campaigning body to complement the work of charities providing housing. Shelter was born.

1966 was also the year that the BBC screened Ken Loach's film about homelessness, Cathy Come Home. Watched by 12 million people on its first broadcast, the film alerted the public, the media, and the government to the scale of the housing crisis, and Shelter gained many new supporters.

Capitalising on the success of Ken Loach’s gritty docudrama Cathy Come Home, screened a couple of weeks before their launch, Shelter mounted a series of successful campaigns consisting of real-life stories with hard-hitting facts.

They told hundreds of stories. An old woman dying of TB in a near-derelict flat. A family cooking on an open fire because they had no kitchen. Children suffering life-changing injuries playing on slum clearance sites.

The public became outraged that these conditions existed in modern Britain which resulted in huge fundraising success and there was a wave of support for our campaigns. One hundred local Shelter groups formed in just six months after thier launch.

Shelter also started to achieve real political success when two party leaders mentioned their report 'Face the Facts' in  their 1969 party conference speeches and their founding Director, Des Wilson, spoke to packed rooms at conferences, rallies, and town halls across the country.

Later, Shelter’s tireless campaigning resulted in a major win when the government passed the Housing Act in 1974. This act provided housing associations with full government funding.


As a result, their resources were freed up for campaigning on other important issues, such as the rights of private tenants and those facing homelessness.

More than four decades of constant lobbying have pressured government into making some key changes to policy and legislation, and Shelter has celebrated some landmark achievements in recent years. These include the ground breaking commitment in Scotland that, by 2012, every homeless person will have the right to a home.

Key Events:
Since the late 1960s, we have pioneered new services that have responded to local housing issues, such as the Liverpool Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project (1969-1972), or ‘SNAP’. This project worked with residents living in slum housing to build neighbourhoods they wanted to live in.

Today, programmes such as The Homeless Families’ Support Service and Inspiring Change Manchester carry on helping those most in need. In 2014–15, Shelter helped 68,946 people through our face-to-face advice and support services.

Thanks to endless campaigning from Shelter, the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act was passed. This seminal piece of legislation codified in law a definition of homelessness that went beyond ‘rooflessness’ and ruled that local authorities have a legal duty to house homeless people.
Their contribution to achieving the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act remains one of our greatest achievements.

In the 1990s, Shelter discovered 31 families living in a Bristol bed and breakfast with one cooker between them, and decided to run a campaign that called the local authorities to account and offered a solution. n

In 1980 we helped to convince the government to give social housing tenants the same security of tenure as private renters. This legal change was fiercely opposed by local authorities, but provided protection for families facing eviction at short notice.

In 1993 we strengthened our legal clout by setting up an in-house legal arm. We employed top housing lawyers to fight directly on behalf of the people we help.

In 2002, a new Housing Act strengthened the legal protections for people facing homelessness.