‘Ban The Single Use Prime Minister’: Sydney designer’s cheeky canvas bag is the one good thing to come out of leadership debacle

A SIMPLE joke with a friend about the Liberal leadership spill turned into an awesome idea that is earning this woman a bucketload of cash.

Gwen Blake Sydney-based a design company Boxer and Co. Picture: Stephen Blake

LIKE the rest of Australia, Sydney designer Gwen Blake watched the Liberal leadership spill unfold on Friday with her mouth agape.

Mrs Blake was texting her friend, ABC presenter Annabel Crabb, about the absurdity of last week’s events and the pair joked that the big supermarkets would be relieved to have found stories about their plastic bag bans pushed out of the headlines.

I wonder if Coles is feeling quietly vindicated by the nation’s reversion to single-use prime ministers?

— Annabel Crabb (@annabelcrabb) August 25, 2018

pic.twitter.com/L3wmKfr6K8

— Gwen Blake (@Glamgwenblake) August 25, 2018

Mrs Blake, who runs design company Boxer and Co, immediately turned the joke into a slogan - “Ban The Single Use Prime Minister” - perfect for an environmentally-friendly canvas shopping bag.

“Banning the plastic bag is something really close to my heart at the moment and with the change in Prime Minster I knew there was some funny joke in there with those two news stories. I thought it would be quite funny if you put it on a bag,” Mrs Blake told news.com.au.

“It was only intended to be a visual joke on social media. I was never going to actually make them. But I started seeing heaps of people saying ‘If these don’t exist already, maybe I’ll make them’ and I thought about how much I would kick myself if I saw someone else making them,” she said.

"Ban The Single Use Prime Minister".

Mrs Blake had made canvas bags before for her design clients, so within 24 hours she had created a design, contacted her existing suppliers and placed an order for 100 bags.

“By Saturday night I had set up an Etsy store, an Instagram account and Facebook page and everything was functioning and ready to go,” she said.

This is totes hilarious! I’m making these by popular demand. It’s a Limited Edition run - get tours here now https://t.co/eMjWgTt0EX #auspol pic.twitter.com/ZCVxZh6Nbd

— Gwen Blake (@Glamgwenblake) August 26, 2018

On Sunday afternoon, a photo of the bag was being shared widely on social media, including with Crabb’s almost 500,000 Twitter followers, and hundreds of orders started coming through.

“Ordered. One for me and one for a friend because it is awesome!” one woman wrote on Facebook. Others wrote: “Just purchased 2! thanks for the laugh” and “I just bought one because this is everything!”

Mrs Blake has now sold more than 500 bags and has made “about five digits” in sales revenue.

“It just went crazy,” Mrs Blake said. “I’m trying to get on with my normal job so every time I have a break and look at my phone I’ve sold more.”

The generosity from Australian women supporting Mrs Blake’s idea has been a pleasant antidote to a nasty week where our politicians displayed some of their most selfish behaviour.

“It was a really nice unity of women,” she said.

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