We are sponsor of the Zakka Life website! Jessica, the creative mind behind this great blog, approached us and asked if we would be interested in sponsering one of her projects and in return our banner is displayed on her website. We agreed and sent her some cute Japanese fabrics. I am looking forward to see what she is going to make with them. Below you can see our cute banner showing some of our favourite Japanese fabrics. If you like, you can place this banner on your website as well.
Today we had a visit from our supplier from Japan. He represents all the popular fancy stationery brands like Q-Lia, Kamio, Crux, Poolcool, Mindwave, Kutsuwa etc. from Japan. His responsibility is exporting these items overseas. We are working with him for just a short while, as I wrote about in an earlier blog post: New Fancy Japanese Stationery Supplier. He was visiting a trade fair here in Hong Kong and we set up a meeting so we could finally meet in person and discuss our future business collaboration. It went really well, he brought lots of new catalogs (he sends us new catalogs every 2 weeks from Japan) with the latest collections and some samples. We are going to place another order shortly as the Japanese stationery items sell really well. I can’t wait to get the new cute stationery items. It is always very exciting to open those parcels 
We bought a new camera for taking product pictures. We used the Canon 30D and replaced it with the newest Canon 7D. It was released today and Alan went and bought it today. He was afraid it will sell out immediately, so he had to get there on the release day. This new camera will help us to take even better pics of our productsand make it easier and faster to take detailed pictures with very nice colours. Of course the camera will be used for other occasions as well, as Alan is a passionate photographer during his free time. We are going back to my hometown Bregenz in Austria during Christmas and I am sure the camera will be used there very often. 
our new camera Canon 7D
OK, so finally the day has come: Alan started working at my office today. I wrote about this before on this blog post: My husband quit his job. He quit his fulltime job to join my business selling cute things in our online shop www.modes4u.com and other channels. His first big project will be programming a software tool to help me adding new items much faster. We have a big problem with that because we get new items all the time, often a few times per week but it is very time consuming to put them one by one into our database. Therefore Alan started writing a software program to make this process faster. This will also help us to make our shop much bigger because we will be able to order more often. I can’t wait to use his tool.
Welcome Alan, have a good start working for our business and Good Luck!
Today we had an appointment with Kokka who is the leading fabric manufacturer in Japan. They have lots of really cute and beautiful fabrics, so I contacted them in Japan and introduced our business to them. They were very interested in working with us together, so they set up a meeting with us in Hong Kong. Luckily, they have a Hong Kong office, so we didn’t need to fly to Japan for the meeting (although I would have really enjoyed a trip to Japan haha). We met with the boss from Japan, who is a really nice and friendly guy and his staff member, who his responsible for their Kokka customers. They showed us a lot of fabric and I was so excited. All these super cute, very detailed and amazing quality fabrics. I was immediately convinced that these fabrics are perfect for our shop and our customers. Everyone will just love them. The print and the colours are so detailed and clear, just incredible. So I chose all my favourite designs and they will prepare the swatches for us and send them by courier to our office tomorrow. I can’t wait to show these fabrics to our customers and order some fabric for our shop as soon as possible.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my husband quit his job to join my business full time and therefore we had to get him an office table as well. He was so looking forward to that, because he really wanted to have a very big table for his own work space. So we went to Ikea and ordered a big corner table for him. I took a few pics while he was assembling the table in our office. As you can see, he is super happy now (the position of the table is not the correct one, we will move it to it’s right position once he starts working).
Alan assembling the table
Happy behind his new office desk
I was looking for a supplier for the popular fancy stationery brands from Japan for quite a while now. These brands are: Q-lia, Mind wave, Crux, Kamio, Coolpool, Cram Cream etc. I wanted to order directly from Japan to make sure that we get the best price possible and also the newest items as soon as they are available. It took me really a long time to finally find a direct business contact in Japan for these brands. They even have an office in Hong Kong to present the brands and I set up an appointment to check out their office, talk about how to work together and most importantly, see their products. So today, Alan and I went to their office, which is surprisingly just a 5min drive by taxi from our office, and met with the boss. She was a very nice lady and we talked for 2 hours about our future collaboration and she also gave us tons of catalogs with all the super cute stationery items inside. We also visited their warehouse and picked up quite a lot of items to put them quickly into our shop. We are going to order from them very often from now on because these cute, kawaii items are just the perfect match for our kawaii shop. And the quality is just amazing, no comparision to the China made items. If you have a business and are interested in wholesale prices, please contact us by email for the huge wholesale catalog. The items can be shipped directly from Japan to your company.
cute pink Kamio memo pad
kawaii Japanese memo pad from Crux
cute animal erasers from Japan
Today my husband finally quit his fulltime job as a Project Manager in a IT department. We are so super busy with our online shop modes4u.com and our wholesale business so we decided it is time for him to quit and join my business. We were planning this for a long time and the day has finally come. He will join me on 1st of October 09 and at the beginning he will write lots of new small software programs for us to make our work easier, more efficient and especially faster. There are a lot of work steps that are really time consuming and repetitive so this software should help us with that. He will also take care about our shop and write some new cool functions for it. I can’t wait for him to start working with me together in our office. It will be lots of fun
YAY today we got our 100th follower on Twitter. Very excited because I just started there for a little while now and I was so surprised that people started adding me without me doing any advertisment about my Twitter account. To follow me, please click here: modes4u on Twitter I write about small bits and pieces about my business, news, new products and life in Hong Kong as a foreigner.
Follow us on Twitter
This morning I saw a truck bursting into flames right around the corner of our office. I passed the truck while I was on the bus as it just broke down. There was some white smoke so I thought, it just overheated. When I walked back from the bus stop to get to my office, I saw the first fire engine arrive and black smoke coming from the front of the truck. I went closer to have a look and the truck just started to burst into flames. It was crazy, the truck was in the middle of a busy street and they had to block all lanes during morning rush hour. The fire got quite big and burned out the whole front of the truck. I took a little video while I was standing there, check it out:
