National Hickman

What a great logo, it’s so unusual, what’s the thinking behind it? These are the sort of things that get repeated to us over and over again and the fact that ‘the little red man’ gets so much attention is an important part of our overall marketing.

There is nothing else in the world like the Easter Island Moai (pronounced moe-eye), which are in fact statues carved from solid rock. When National Hickman was created in April 1999 we chose a moai to symbolise the fact that National Hickman was different too – our product offering was unique to the market then and today it still stands for the unique and unmatched quality that we offer to home builders throughout the British Isles.

Recently, thousands of tourists travelled to Easter Island to witness a solar eclipse – this event alone meant that the population of the remote island was doubled for the four minute eclipse which put the whole island into shadow before it moved off across the Pacific. So for those who didn’t get there, or maybe have no idea where Easter Island is, here is a potted history of the mysterious statues.

Easter Island is a tiny spec of land, just 164 kilometres square, lying in the Pacific Ocean between Chile and New Zealand – it is so small that it is hard to find on some maps! The Easter Islanders carved bigger and bigger moai, between the 13th and 17th centuries, in memory of their ancestors. There were originally over 880 of them, and they have many different features. Some ‘wear’ hats carved from red scoria, a volcanic pumice stone. To the islanders its red colour represented  hair tied into top knots called ‘Pukao’.

almost all of the moai originally faced inland with their backs to the sea, and were built as icons of ancestors, to protect the people. The method of production and how they were placed in position is considered to be a remarkable intellectual, creative and physical feat, although the islanders today would have you believe that the statues actually walked to where they eventually stood!

The tallest of them all, called Maoi Paro, was almost 10 metres high and weighed 86 tonnes; the heaviest which forms part of Ahu Tongariki (ahu = burial ground), where 15 moai have been re-erected and can be seen in position today, weighed in at 85 tonnes. There is one which remained unfinished which it has been calculated would have been 165 tonnes and 21 metres tall. They must have taken some moving around, and it is thought that a complex system of timber levers was used, which is one of the reasons that there are no trees growing on the island today.

The moai are monolithic – carved in one piece – formed from a single material with no seams; today we can interpret that as one undifferentiated whole, a unified message – such as the one that National Hickman gives out to the market.