Today I was finally able to contact Cosmo Fabrics in Japan. I was looking for their contact details for a long, long time because we really wanted to sell their really cute fabrics. We don’t order our fabrics from wholesalers or distributors but only directly from the manufacturer, therefore I was looking very hard to find the maker of all those cute, kawaii fabrics. I am sure fans of Japanese, kawaii fabric have seen them before and know why we want them so badly. We got a lot of customer requests to stock them and today I was able to contact their sales department in Japan. Without knowing Japanese it is almost impossible to find any Japanese manufacturer. Cosmo and we will work out the details now and hopefully a first order of Cosmo fabrics will arrive soon. I will definitely keep everyone updated here on our blog about any news.

We received four new Kokka fabrics from Japan today. They are all fairy tale fabrics with characters like Little Red Riding Hood, Bremen Town Musicians, Bambi, Tom Thumb and more. All fabrics are made in Japan and are super adorable. I imagine those fabrics are perfect as curtains for children, pillow cases, as a dress, patchwork, buttons or anything else cute you can imagine. Have a look at the kawaii fabrics:

Little Red Riding Hood fabric

Little Red Riding Hood canvas fabric

Bremen Town Musicians Japanese fabric

Tom Thumb kawaii fabric from Japan

We finally got a new newsletter template for our retail and wholesale newsletter. The old template was quite dark with lots of black/dark grey and we wanted to make the newsletter more recognizable for our customer. So we came up with a template that looks very similar to our online shop. We think the new template is much cleaner, easy to read and shows the products nicely. I hope you guys like the new newsletter as well. If you want to receive our newsletter, go to our website and fill in your email address in the newsletter box on the lower right corner of our kawaii shop. Please feel free to comment any suggestions or changes you would like to see in our newsletter. Below you can see our first retail newsletter with the new template sent out to our customers today (upper part is in German, the lower part is in English). 

New Newsletter Template

We have a big order for one of our customers in production at the moment. The deadline is approaching and we wanted to do some inspection of the goods ourselves to make sure the products are alright. The factory is in China, Guangdong province. Initially we planned to send 2 people to the factory but one of our staff was stopped at the border because her China ID card just expired and she couldn’t enter China. Therefore, Alan went by himself to the factory to have a look. He took some pictures of the factory in China. They were still working on part of the products, mainly sewing on handles on bags. The order included a lot of other items as well (socks, gloves, scarfs, hats, wallets, armwarmer, necklaces and more) but most of those items were made in another factory.  Below you can see the pictures and maybe you can imagine now a bit better where your bags come from and how they are made

Chinese factory making bags for us

several people sewing on handles on bags

all those bags are for our order

the

another picture of the factory in China

We received our first order of Japanese Lecien fabrics today. They are really adorable cute fabrics with very brilliant colours and prints. This is our first cooperation with Lecien and we plan to stock more of their Japanese fabrics in the future. Please let us know if we should stock a specific Lecien fabric. As we are working with Lecien directly together, we are only able to get the newest fabric collections, not 2 year old prints. Sorry. Below you can see some of the new Lecien fabrics available in our shop now:

black Japanese fabric with many donuts, cupcakes, ice cream, lollipops, macaroons and strawberries

pink Japanese fabric with many teddy bears, donuts, cupcakes and hearts

turquoise Japanese fabric with many white kitties, cherries, hearts and dots

black Japanese fabric with many strawberries, decoration and glitter

We booked tickets for Tokyo, Japan today! We will be in Tokyo from 16th April till 19th April 2010. Alan, my husband, and I are going together and it’s our first trip to Japan. We do have some Japanese suppliers but we do all our business over the internet. Therefore, we never had to come to Japan to visit them in person. A few suppliers we know in person because they visited us in our office in Hong Kong, like for example our contact person for Kamio, Crux, Q-Lia and more. Our plan is to do some sightseeing, see the beautiful cherry blossom and eat lots of good food. We are big fans of sushi and eat a lot of it in Hong Kong. But of course, we also plan to check out lots of shops and products to see the latest trends in Japan and find new suppliers. I will definitely write a blog post about our trip including lots of pictures when we are back from our trip. I can’t wait to go!

We got the newest licensed fabric catalog 2010 from Kokka this week and updated our Kokka wholesale catalog. Please contact us by email if you are interested in getting this catalog. Please only contact us if you have a registered business. This catalog includes all the newest Japanese fabrics from Kokka including Trefle, Push Pin, Eau de Mer, November books, Story books etc. Below you can see some of the fabrics already available in our shop: 

Little Red Riding Hood fabric

Cinderella Japanese fabric

Peter Pan Kokka fabric

Bremen Town Musicians fabrics from Kokka Japan

cute deer fabric Eau de Mer by Kokka

pink cupcakes gauze fabric from Japan

Zakkalife wrote another blog post about one of our Kokka fabrics, the pink Alice in Wonderland fabric. She got that fabric a while ago and had some leftover and decided to make cute Alice hairclips with them. I really like the matte finish of the hairclips. Have a look at them:

cute Alice in Wonderland hairclips

I like the matte hairclips

Today our shop is 2 years old! We opened our kawaii shop modes4u.com on 20th March 2008 and we have come very far since then. Our shop is successully operating to employ 3 people fulltime and keep us busy. We have lots of plans for the 3rd year of our shop including lots of new products, a new shop template, more functions in the shop and a lot more. Happy Birthday modes4u!

Ben from Michael Miller fabrics visited us at our office today. He is on a business trip around Asia visiting customers and we set up a meeting with him a few weeks ago because we are very interested in starting to sell their fabrics in our shop. Ben showed up with a huge suitcase full of fabric swatches of their current collections and the newest designs. We could even have a look at the not yet released fabrics for the coming months. Their fabrics are amazing, very bright, colouful fabrics, high quality material and great selection of different designs. Lots of our customers asked us to get more fabrics for boys and luckily Michael Miller does have a big choice of boys prints. After Ben showed us all their fabrics we invited him to have a traditional Chinese lunch, also called “Yum Cha” in Chinese, including some delicious steamed dumplings, seafood and other good food. It was the first time for Ben coming to Hong Kong and to eat in a traditional Chinese restaurant. He was very impressed by the size of the restaurant and he liked the food very much. Altogether it was a great first meeting and definitely a good start doing business together.

Ben showing me Michael Miller fabrics