Serving only hot stuff

Gift ideas, dog tips, honest reviews and all the latest from behind the scenes, with absolutely no boring bits allowed.

No boring blogs here!

Quirky gifts UK: ideas for people who are hard to buy for

Some people are easy to buy for. They send you a link, tell you exactly what they want and everybody goes home happy. Then there are the others. They already own everything useful, have very specific taste or respond to “What do you want for your birthday?” with the deeply unhelpful answer of “nothing”. That is where we can help! Bob & Friends is built around colourful, characterful and slightly unexpected things, so we have pulled together a few gift ideas for the people who

Why we choose to work with small UK makers and shops

Bob & Friends was never meant to be a shop filled with hundreds of things you could find anywhere else. When I moved from East London to the Sussex countryside, I started discovering just how many brilliant small businesses were making interesting products of their own. That became a big part of the idea behind Bob & Friends. Some things in the shop are made by us. The rest are carefully chosen from small UK businesses and independent makers whose products genuinely feel like

Meet Bob: the Labradoodle with his own gift shop

Bob is the Labradoodle behind Bob & Friends, our colourful little online shop run from Sussex. The business may technically require a human to do the emails, packing and boring admin, but it would be fairly difficult to call it Bob & Friends without Bob. Who is Bob? Bob is our very silly Labradoodle and the dog the whole shop is named after. When I moved from East London to the Sussex countryside, I became much more aware of the brilliant small businesses and independent make