Talking Tables

Talking Tables – It Started at a Kitchen Table

1999. Clare Harris sits at her mother’s kitchen table and discovers something many people know but few turn into a business: the joy of arranging a table where people want to feel at ease, laugh and linger. The styling, the selecting, the bringing together of colours, shapes and details that turn a dinner into a memory. Tablescaping, as she calls it. An art form that found barely any expression in British retail at the time – coordinated, atmospheric table accessories simply did not exist.

What Clare Harris recognised was not a gap in the market in the conventional sense. It was a question of conviction. Why should a celebration look as though it was thrown together as an afterthought, when it deserves exactly the opposite?

Organic Growth, Clear Conviction

Clare Harris left a well-paid career in the corporate world and founded Talking Tables from her own kitchen table. Without external investors, without venture capital. What counted was the conviction that there was a genuine market for what she wanted to create. Eight products stood at the beginning. Today the range encompasses well over 1,000 articles.

The company grew organically – through quality, through recognisability and through the loyalty of a trade that valued the products. Today John Lewis, Waitrose, Selfridges and Barnes & Noble count among its customers. That is not a random selection. It is an expression of where Talking Tables is positioned: in the upper segment of mass retail, at the intersection of everyday usability and genuine design ambition.

A Brand with Conviction – B Corp and King’s Award

Talking Tables is not merely a party decoration brand. It is a brand with a worldview. In 2023, Clare Harris received the prestigious King’s Award for Enterprise – one of the highest British distinctions for business achievement. In the same year she was named among the top 100 women in business in the United Kingdom.

The company is certified as a B Corporation – an independently awarded standard that demonstrates a company is not only economically successful but also acts with social responsibility. For Talking Tables this means in practice: products without plastic, materials that can be recycled at home, the complete elimination of single-use plastics from the range, and the removal of conventional glitter from new collections. Talking Tables was also the first brand in the world to develop and bring to market a fully recyclable paper cup for the party sector.

In parallel, the company is actively engaged against social isolation: with every order placed in its own online shop, a product is donated to a charitable community event. The team has paid volunteering days, and the company works with organisations that enable lonely elderly people to gather together.

Design as Core Competence

What technically distinguishes Talking Tables from other party article suppliers is its consistent design approach. Products are not sourced on the basis of ‘cheap and available’ – they are developed in-house. The result is collections that are coordinated with one another, have a distinctive style and remain recognisable across seasons. Every collection tells a story. Whether a birthday, a wedding, Christmas or a spontaneous evening at the table – Talking Tables provides the visual language for it.

The product range extends from cake toppers and bunting through table decorations, paper tableware, games and napkins to seasonal themed collections. The design team in London always develops in the creative tension between trend and timelessness – products that feel current but are not interchangeable.

Why Talking Tables Belongs at miniSchoggi

Anyone who bakes at miniSchoggi thinks in moments. The moment the cake comes out of the oven. The moment pralines release from the mould. And the moment all of it lands on a table that looks as though someone truly thought it through. That final moment is precisely Talking Tables territory.

What Talking Tables brings is not merely decoration. It is context. A cake topper that speaks to the cake. Bunting that transforms a room. Napkins, table decorations and accessories that work together, because they were conceived together from the start. That is the difference between a table that makes an impression and a table that leaves one.

The Talking Tables range at miniSchoggi is continuously developed and deliberately kept open – because celebrations change, occasions come and go, and the right choice is sometimes whatever has just arrived. Sustainably produced, designed with conviction, British through and through.

Designed. Celebrated. Together. Talking Tables.