Greetings With A Feel-Good Factor

Anna Danielle is the founder and face behind the delightful Derbyshire-based greetings card and gifts company The Little Dog Laughed. As the successful company celebrates its 20th anniversary year, Penelope Baddeley went to meet her

Apart from a brief spell when she desperately wanted to own a pet shop so she could play with animals all day long, Derby-born Anna Danielle knew her work would involve art, design, and in particular drawing.

‘I love drawing and knew it was something I wanted to do from about the age of ten,’ said the 44-year-old creative director of ‘ the little dog laughed’ – whose designs featuring four-legged furry friends can be seen in gift shops across the county, country and the English speaking world.

It was whilst at Winchester School of Art studying for her textiles degree that Anna did a greeting card project and that was her eureka moment. For her final year project at university, surrounded by textile students dazzled with dreams of high fashion and futures in smart London design studios, Anna opted for a simpler subject matter – cows. ‘Growing up in

Ashbourne I fell in love with the green fields, the cows, the tranquillity and loveliness of the English countryside.’

She entitled her degree project ‘the little dog laughed’, taken from the nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ and the line that follows the phrase, ‘the cow jumped over the moon’.

Despite the offers of several London-based and potentially glamorous jobs after graduating in 1996, Anna opted to head back to Derbyshire and start her own business from the bedroom of her childhood home. She started by making handmade calico fabric-fronted cards, a laborious process which took three hours to produce each card and resulted in permanent nerve damage to her shoulder. But she got her first order – from Bennetts of Derby, one of Derbyshire’s oldest department stores, who placed in their Derby branch her sepia wash doggy drawings – featured on both cards and cushions. ‘It made me think if it’s good enough for Bennetts I can try somewhere else.’