We wish everyone a Merry Christmas 2009! We are in Austria now visiting my family for Christmas and enjoying our holidays a lot. To give you guys an idea what we are doing, I added some photos below:

Christmas Dinner at my home

we went to Nurnberg, Germany to visit the famous Christmas market

in the Austrian mountains, it was snowing crazily and we had lots of fun.

We had to cover our mouth and nose because it was so freezing cold.

one of our many crashes with the sled. We always landed in the soft snow so it didn't hurt.

A few days ago I wrote that Alan wrote a Dawanda tool for us. Now, he also completed a product adding tool for our Etsy shop. The functionality is exactly the same as the Dawanda tool, just adapted to the Etsy settings. Here is a link to our Etsy Shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/modes4u

Alan programmed another tool for me to make my work easier. We have a Dawanda shop and sell some of our products in that shop as well. Have a look at our Dawanda Shop: kawaii Planet. Adding products to this shop is really a huge workload, therefore Alan wrote a tool for us that makes it possible to almost automatically upload new products from our product database to Dawanda without me doing a lot. No more “copy-paste”, no more ticking the same boxes, no more uploading of product photos! YAY! I am so excited! This will save me LOOOOTS of time (that I can use to search for more cute products for our shop).

• Mode
• Accessoires
• Taschen
• Schmuck
• Baby
• Kind
• Wohnen + Leben
• Kunst
• Material
• Vintage

We got a new blog design for this blog today! I wanted to have a cuter blog template than the one we used before. Therefore we decided to use one of our favorite and topselling Japanese fabrics as a background picture. It is the pink matryoshka animals fabric by Kokka. At the same time, we also changed our Twitter background to match it to the blog. You can have a look at our Twitter account here: modes4u on Twitter I hope you guys like the new design

pink matryoshka animals fabric

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 a Kokka employee because they wanted to show us the newest designs they just released. That’s so super convenient when the suppliers come to your office to show you their newest collection. I must say, I LOVE LOVE LOVE their new collection. There are so many adorable, cute, kawaii, lovely fabrics, it will be really hard to choose which ones we will order. Unfortunately, I cannot order all of them because there is a budget limit Below you can see some of my favourite new fabrics from Kokka. I hope we will get them for our shop soon.

Matryoshka Fabric from Kokka

monkey with black kitty Japanese fabric

pink hearts with glitter girls Kokka fabric

pink Japanese fabric with cupcakes, candy and more

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!

Yesterday, I got a call from Kokka telling me that they just got over 30 new fabrics in that were just released. They want to show us the fabrics, so we set up a meeting for today. Luckily, typhoon Koppu who went over Hong Kong last night, made landfall a few hours before the meeting, so it was safe to go out. It is pretty dangerous to leave your home during a typhoon in Hong Kong because of all the signs hanging above everywhere and quite a few fall every time. Anyway, we went to their office and we saw LOTS of super cute new designs. I can’t believe how their designers can come up with so many new cute designs every month. There were cute animals dressed as Matryoshkas, cute black kitty fabrics, little piggies with icecream cones and glitter, peach and cherry blossom fabric and so many more. I will post some pics of the newest Kokka fabrics after the swatches arrived. They will send them to us by courier tomorrow.