We updated our ‘About us‘ page on our shop because we haven’t uploaded any new pictures for a while. We now have all staff pictures included + some pictures of our office and warehouse. I hope you like the photos and the little insight into our company. Our office is actually getting really crowded now, I guess we need to move to a new office in a couple of months because we are getting more and more items and we need lots of space to store them. Here is the link to our new page: About us

our office

We had a fun DIY day in our office today. Pui Chi, my sister-in-law, came to our office to start her own new project. We work together with her to help her make her own chop collection and she will also make some buttons for our shop. We ordered all the machines and equipment already and today we tried out all of them. She made some really cute buttons with some leftover Hello Kitty fabrics and Japanese fabrics. Then we tried out the chop machine. I was really surprised, the chop making machine is amazing. The quality of the final product is really, really good. I documented our day with some pictures:

Hello Kitty buttons and strawberry buttons made by us

cute button made with Japanese Kokka fabric

first step to make a chop: we designed it on a computer, then printed it on special paper

next step cutting out the chop sponge and transfer the image onto the sponge with the special machine

we dropped a few drops of ink onto the chop sponge and started testing. The result is very nice and very detailed.

We ordered some more shelves for our office so we can expand our warehouse space and stock more products. We totally ran out of space and had to get more shelves. I took some pictures to show how hard we worked today

the first few new shelves are standing

we plan to expand our fabric section

all Kutsuwa products (DIY clay sets) got their own shelves

after we finished: the fabrics have more space now and we are ready to receive the next fabric orders

more space for our Kokka fabric bolts

part of our stock + the packing area

me working on my desk (on the left side is Pui Chi, my sister-in-law who was making buttons in that moment)

The official Hong Kong distributor of Re-Ment visited us at our office today because we are very interested in selling Re-Ment products in our shop. If you don’t know who or what Re-Ment is: Re-Ment is a famous Japanese company making miniature sets of food, licensed characters, animals and more. They would fit perfectly into our collection and we are sure our customer will love them as well. Of course we plan to order from Re-Ment directly in the future (we usually order directly from the manufacturers without any middlemen involved), but for now, we want to test the market and order smaller quantities first. Below you can see some of my favorite Re-Ment sets:

miniature kitchenware set with pandas

cute miniature gingerbread houses

Alice in Wonderland keychains

miniature animals baking yummy food

very realistic looking miniature sushi

my favorite: very cute miniature cake charms

Re-Ment miniature set with strawberries

10 different sets with the strawberry theme

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 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!

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

We bought a professional scanner for our office for scanning products, fabric swatches, catalogs, books, magazines and so on. Our old scanner isn’t good enough for high quality pictures, so we invested the money into this new toy: Microtek ScanMaker i800

professional scanner

Hong Kong has finally it’s own Google Streetview version and of course we had to check it out and browse through our neighbourhood, our home and our office area. If you are interested where our office is and how the area looks like, you can have a look here. The first streetview shows the back entrance of the office. The 2nd streetview shows the busy main entrance. When you look up you can see our office. Turn around on the 2nd streetview and be ready for a surprise . Can you find it?

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

Today is the 1st day of our newest addition to our team: Her name is Bonnie and she will work with us together in a fulltime position. So we are now a team of 3 fulltime staff. She will be responsible for packing all your orders and ship them. She will also take care of some office related work like scanning documents and pictures, helping with the wholesale catalogs, buying office supplies and other related work. Welcome to our team Bonnie!

me teaching Bonnie how to pack the orders