INTERVIEW WITH ANNE JESSOP OF THE ROYAL MINT

MA: The popularity of the Beatrix Potter coins took everyone by surprise and I suspect the programme was inadvertently expanded to include the last four characters this year. The recent Paddington Bear series, the latest James Cook and RAF £2 series and more importantly the project of the A to Z 10-pence coins took a lot of collectors by surprise. How did this set come about? Who’s idea was this? I’d like to give them credit where it’s due.

AJ: I’d say the A to Z set it was a team idea. We wanted to put something together that would allow people to collect out of their change and that’s why we chose the 10-pence denomination because we appreciate people can’t always take a pound or two pounds out of their change because this inevitably becomes expensive. We wanted to celebrate British life and we as a team thought that across the world people have launched other programmes which included a large number of coins and we, as a team, got together and came up with this idea and we’re really pleased with it. It’s gone incredibly well and got people talking about coins and that was a primary goal — for people to talk about coins.

2018 10-pence coins

MA: I think it has created new collectors in the same way the United States did with the 25-cent State quarters coins, though I’ve not seen a single 10-pence coin in circulation myself. I have heard repeatedly that one of the frustrations with new collectors is that they “can’t find the coins in circulation” and have to buy packaged pieces from coin distributors at an increased price. With the success of the Royal Australian Mint and their arrangement with Woolworth’s which functions as a supermarket in Australia to distribute collector coin sets — would this be something the Royal Mint might consider?

AJ: As you’ll appreciate, the Treasury approves circulation coins which have a commemorative design, they order them from the Royal Mint and they tell us how many can be placed in circulation. I think as coins are ordered less in the future, there may be different ways that we can work on having different types of sets and how we can get them out to interested collectors. This is something that Nicola Howell’s (Director of Consumer Business) team is working on, she has taken over from me in the collector coins division and whether that includes a supermarket for instance as a direct point of sales, I can’t say, but it’s very much about thinking of different solutions.

Going back to the A to Z set, and listening to collector’s comments about packaging, when collectors ordered the coins directly from the mint, we didn’t use a lot of packaging which resulted in the least expensive option that was really quite reasonable. I think there are different ways we can think about that alternative in going forward.

To read the complete article, see:
An interview with Anne Jessop of the Royal Mint (http://world.mintnewsblog.com/2018/11/an-interview-with-anne-jessop-of-the-royal-mint/)

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