Obi the Wonderdog Makes Headlines!

Congratulations to Obi on making the Lava section of the widely read Manly Daily!


To read more about turning your pet photos into Pop Art click here.

Sydney Telegraph on Pascoe Pop Art

We were very happy to hear we'd made the inside back page of the Telegraph last week.



Click here to read the story by Lisa Toia.

Gotta love shopping online!

Now my friends (and definitely my mum) will back me up here when I say I am NOT a shopper! Something about walking miles and miles through store after store of beautiful things with beautiful people selling them to you... well it just makes me anxious, grumpy and generally not fun to be around. Even on the rare occasions that I'm cashed up and ready to spend, it's best to leave me to my own devices.

So I've worked out that online shopping is just perfect for me. I've just made my third purchase at an Australian online store called Fully Stoked and I can't recommend them enough. They sell clothing, accessories and toys that are of high quality (T-shirts I have washed hundreds of times are still the same colour and unstretched), affordable and guaranteed sweat-shop free. And to top it all off, the good people running the show send a whopping 30% of their annual profits to global charities! (makes the 10% that we donate to MSF look pretty slack!).

Of course shopping of the online kind can present a few hazards of its own... I particularly seem to have trouble making the connection between the purchases I make and my rapidly declining bank balance... like how I just bought this gorgeous doll made from 100% organic cotton for my God-daughter even though her birthday is not for another 10 months.


Oh well, I figure it is from Fully Stoked, so really it would be a disservice to this world if I did NOT buy it (I can justify anything).

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Pop Art customers are donating hundreds to MSF!

Our thanks to Pascoe Pop Art customers in January and February. We have just made another donation to MSF of 10% of proceeds from the Pop Art portraits you purchased. Your contribution will have a vast affect on the quality of life of so many people less fortunate than ourselves.

This diagram is from the MSF donations page:


Read about some of the programs our most recent donation will specifically fund.

Pascoe Pop Art donates 10% of all sales proceeds to Medecins Sans Frontiers

Pascoe Pop Art donates 10% to MSF...

"There is one illness that is tearing communities apart. This illness affects some 60 million children. What’s more, it’s a killer. At least 5 million children die from its effects every year. This illness is malnutrition."

Thanks to all our customers who purchased their own piece of Pascoe Pop Art in November and December 2006, we have been able to make our first official donation to Medecins Sans Frontieres of 10% of all sales proceeds.

We donated specifically to the MSF 'Malnutrition Appeal' which funnels money directly towards providing urgently-needed food supplements to malnourished children around the world. A new vitamin-rich 'Ready-to-use Therapeutic Food' has been developed which is eaten directly from the packet and thus allows the family to administer it to the child in their own home instead of having to travel away from their homes and livelihoods to get to medical facilities. Furthermore, unlike other milk-powder based supplements, it does not need mixing with water, which has been an ongoing problem in communities with no access to a hygienic water supply.

According to MSF, our donation will "help to set up an ambulatory feeding programme, reaching out to hundreds of vulnerable families".

Click here to find out more.

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Stop Press

Our first bit of media attention came with a great story in Queensland's Courier Mail.



Click here to read the article. Or go to PascoePopArt.com to view our collection of personalised Pop Art portraits.

Social Entrepeneurs...

This journey into the economic opportunities offered by the world wide web has really got me thinking of where it can take us (us meaning you, me and the rest of the world). I mean, if two well-educated Aussies can sit in their rented apartment with little more than a couple of laptops and a good internet connection and start a global enterprise with a budget of less than $1000… (ha ha, now you know how loaded we are!)… what amazing opportunities are there then available to others who are far less fortunate than ourselves? So as I’m learning more and more of what the web has to offer, I’m trying to think of ways that to apply this knowledge in ways other than building up my own cash flow.

Fortunately I’m not the only one! (it’s going to be a long while yet before my skills are going to save an under-developed nation!) There are plenty of social entrepreneurs out there and I’m very interested in learning more about them and promoting what they do. This website – www.kiva.org – is an awesome example. This is what they do:

“Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.”

Have a look at the website, and even better, sign up if you’re in a position to do so. And if you have any of your own ideas or know of other people doing amazing things, let me know!

Medecins Sans Frontieres

It’s a small world…

How many times a week do you find yourself saying that? I swear I say it all the time… but then again it may have something to do with the fact that I live in Brisbane – not exactly a heaving metropolis and thus it is perhaps not that crazy that my boyfriend’s best-mate’s mate is my house-mate’s work-mate’s mate. Hmm…

Anyway, I found myself saying it again on Saturday night. I was at a farewell party in one of Vegas’s happening bars (meaning it was crawling with 19-year-olds) and was introduced to a lovely lady, Fiona Terry, who, by the way, has worked for MSF Australia for the past 10 years. No way, we are donating 10% of our profits to MSF. Ok, not too crazy a coincidence I suppose, but certainly was enough of a connection to get a conversation started with a very interesting and intelligent woman.

I took the opportunity of finding out as much as I could about Fiona’s work (poor woman was probably looking forward to a nice relaxing night out with some close friends!). But she was such an inspiration, having devoted her whole working life to global social justice causes, and seemed more than happy to share some stories with me. She has been stationed in so many hot spots including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the North Korean border. And she gave me a glimpse into a completely new perspective to the provision of international aid. I’m not even going to try to pretend I understand it at the moment, but I plan to do a lot more reading on the subject to enlighten myself a little more.

Fiona has written a book called “Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action” – possibly not the lightest of bed-time reading, but I’m going to see if I can get through it. I just found a couple of interesting articles on her work also, including this one, which I found quite interesting.

I love it when you meet someone who really inspires you and reminds you how much potential every human being has to make a difference in the world.

Doctors Without Borders

This is my favourite part about starting up the business. Even before we had the personalised Pop Art idea, Matt and I were tossing around business ideas with the intention of diverting a percentage of profits to charitable organisations. We’ve got a few more ideas on the boil of how we’d like to do this (and encourage more businesses to do it). But for now, we are really happy to be donating 10% of our sales proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. They are a fantastic organisation and one that has had a huge impact in times of crises worldwide.

We’ll be publishing a cumulative total of donations made to Doctors Without Borders on the website. It will be great to watch that number grow! Keep an eye out for it soon.