Today we got a big delivery from Japan including lots of new cute kawaii bento boxes. I just love ordering those Japanese lunch boxes because their quality is very high, the colours and printing perfect and their design is so adorably cute. Below you can see some of the bentos we got today:

Japanese strawberry bento box from Phoenix

Alice in Wonderland Lunch Box

Little Red Riding Hood bento box

4 pieces bento box set with cute bears

We purchased a new cutting tool for cutting our fabrics faster and more efficient. As our number of fabric orders increased significantly over the last weeks, we decided to order a professional automatic fabric cutting tool. We fixed the tool onto the floor because our floor tiles are exactly 0.5m wide, so they are perfect as a measuring tool for our fabrics (all our fabrics are sold in 0.5m increments). The fabric cutter is very easy to use. It is electrical, so you only need to turn it on, put the fabric correctly over the metal blade and push it slightly and it cuts the fabric perfectly and clean. It is so easy to use, you can cut the fabric with one finger only! What an improvement to our previous manual hand fabric cutter. I took some pictures of the tool below, so you can see how it looks like (the counter is counting how many fabrics you cut on that day):

our old hand fabric cutter

our new 'toy': an automatic fabric cutter

closeup of the fabric cutter including counter

Today we received an email from a magazine in Germany who would like to publish one of our pictures. The magazine is a Psychology magazine and funnily they plan to write an article about bento boxes and how to prepare a cute lunch box. They wanted to use one of our bento pictures to show it in the article. We are really glad that our shop is getting more popular and even magazines and their editors are starting to be interested in our products.

I got some super cute Red Pockets for Chinese New Year for our customers. We will add one to every order including a cute deco tape and our new business card inside. We have enough Red Pockets for 200 orders. I am sure that is a really cute gift By the way, those Red Pockets are called “Lai See” in Chinese and are usually used to give money to relatives, friends and co-workers during Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year Red Pockets

Today we finally received our new business cards. We were bored with our old business cards and designs new ones. The background pictures used are Japanese fabric patterns by Kokka. We will add to every order one of those super cute cards. I hope everyone likes the new business card.

business card front

business card back

We were contacted by a German seller who is organizing a special promo bag auction on Dawanda (the German version of Etsy) for a charity project called “Atmenreich”. They take care of children during the day who have respiration illnesses (lung etc.). Of course we agreed to join this project as it is for a good cause. We will sponsor some of our Japanese fabrics and send it to the seller. They will then sew some cute bags with those fabrics and fill it with lots of cute things from other sellers in Germany. These kawaii promo bags will be sold in April on Dawanda.com. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this will be a successful charity project.

we are mentioned on the first page of the flyer as the fabric sponsor (name: Kawaii-Planet, our Dawanda shop)

the list of all the other sellers who join the charity promo auction

Today I found some really fun food in the supermarket here in Hong Kong. Guess what, I found Hello Kitty spaghetti, Hello Kitty olive oil, Hello Kitty ground coffee and Hello Kitty Italian biscuits. Isn’t that really crazy? I had to take some pictures to show you guys:

Hello Kitty spaghetti

Hello Kitty pasta

Hello Kitty olive oil

Hello Kitty bolognese sauce

Hello Kitty noodles

Hello Kitty ground coffee

Hello Kitty Italian biscuits

We are back at work today. We had a great Christmas holiday and enjoyed the time with my family a lot. But now we are back at work and with lots of new ideas and plans for 2010. Expect a lot of new products, offers and sooo much more. We will be busy packing for at least a few days now because we accumulated quite a big number of orders during our holidays. I hope everyone’s package will arrive quickly. Let’s have a fun, cute and successful start into the business year 2010!

We send everyone all the best from Austria! I hope you have a great New Year 2010 and may there be lots of cute things happening I added some photos from our stay in Austria again. We booked a private plane to take us to the Austrian and Swiss mountains for a great view. It was snowing the night before heavily and on the day of our flight, it was a perfect sunny day so we could take lots of great pictures of my home. Enjoy!

beautiful Lake of Constance, my hometown Bregenz is right next to it

bird's eye view of Lindau, Germany, the island in the Lake of Constance

the Austrian Alps: beautiful and breathtaking

Wanna go skiing? It was a perfect day for doing that.

me on the plane being super happy

Alan was the Co Pilot

and one more pic of the gorgeous white mountains