Competition Winner - New Product Competition

We have loved reading your entries for our July competition, where we asked you to suggest a mantra for us to bring to life as a necklace this year. There have been hundreds of entries across all three of our social media platforms, and three of us have been reading and debating all of them.

We’d like to give you a HUGE thank you for all your entries. It’s brilliant to see how inspired you all are by mantras, and what power words can have to motivate and inspire.

And it’s wonderful to see that so many of you are right on our wavelength, as several entries are suggestions that we already have as necklaces! 

For example, ‘I am enough’ is one of our most popular necklaces, launched a couple of years ago – and dozens of you suggested this as your favourite mantra.

There were also many suggestions around self-belief - which were similar to our two ‘Believe’ necklaces – ‘Believe in yourself. We do’ and ‘Anything is possible if you believe’.

Several of you also wanted something around smiles, laughter and sunshine – some of you inspired by Helen Keller’s famous quote, ‘If you keep your face to the sun, you will never see the shadows’. And many of you suggested phrases around being in the present, and making the most of today.

We love these ideas, as they chime with many of our existing mantras. But we couldn't pick them as our winner, as we felt that many of them have a very similar message as some of the necklaces we have already. ‘May I always find light in the darkness and sunshine in the shadows’ is one of our very popular discs; along with ‘Be here now’.

There were also several suggestions that were direct quotations from famous people or authors, which, unfortunately, we aren’t able to use unless they are out of copyright. Copyright laws in the UK are very clear: as a business, we are not able to use an exact quotation from someone to create a commercial piece of jewellery, unless the words are out of copyright - either, because they died over 70 years ago, or their estate no longer owns the copyright.

For example, we can use quotes by Shakespeare or from the Bible, but we couldn’t use a phrase from someone still alive today. But you, as a customer, are allowed to have copyrighted words engraved on a necklace that you buy from us. This is because it is for your own personal use, not for commercial use. 

Three of us in the Mantra team – myself, Anna and Sinade – each shortlisted our favourites from amongst the many hundreds of entries, and spent hours debating which ones would make the strongest phrase for a necklace. After much discussion, we have settled on a simple and direct phrase that really resonated with us. It is a powerful and affirmative mantra of determination and self-belief, and one which we think will resonate with many of you:

The lady who suggested this, Cathie Garrett, used it over and over again on her slimming journey, and it helped her to lose over 4 stone. We can see many applications of this affirmation, to help strengthen our resilience and increase our determination to succeed (‘I will’), whilst also reminding us of our ability and capability (‘I can’).

When we told Cathie she was our winner, she was absolutely delighted: 

"Thank you so much for choosing my mantra as your winner! I'm so pleased that it won, as I'm 100% sure it will help others. 'I can and I will' helped me lose over 4 stone in weight, as I said it over and over when I doubted myself. We need to believe in ourselves much more than what we do, and I just know that 'I can and I will' will remind us everyday that we are capable of being the very best version of ourselves. Thank you again for the fabulous prize, and for spreading positivity x"

So, a huge well done to Cathie, who wins a £100 voucher immediately to spend on Mantra Jewellery, and will also receive the ‘I can and I will’ necklace, once it has been designed and created. 

Now, we are getting together as a design team, to decide how is the best way of bringing these powerful words to life as a necklace.

You will know that, sometimes, we feel words are powerful on their own; and other times – we feel a symbol has a stronger power to convey a phrase. For example, one of our bestselling necklace is our Phoenix – a beautiful filigree design of a bird with its wings in the air. It comes on a card showing burning flames, as the Phoenix is re-born from flames. This necklace represents the mantra, ‘Always, I rise’. On the other hand, our popular ‘Be Here Now’ necklace has those three words on a disc, with the mantra, ‘Where am I? Here. When is it? Now’, on the card. In this instance, we felt words worked better.

So – over the next few weeks, we will be working on the design and samples, ready to launch later in the year. We’ll keep you updated about our progress, and let you know when it’s launching. 

Again - thank you all for taking the time to enter, and for giving it so much thought. We have always believed that words have great power, and it seems that you do to. 

And well done to Cathie, our lucky winner!