Bianca from Germany joined our team this week. She just moved from Cologne to Hong Kong a couple of days ago and is very excited to be here. We welcomed her by taking her out for some Dim Sum, a very typical style of Chinese Food. You order a lot of different dishes that are served in small portions and everybody can help himself. As you can see, there was a lot of food on the table. Bianca really enjoyed that Chinese experience and tried as much as she could, although she didn’t always know what she was eating. The only thing she refused to try was a serve of chicken feet, a dish you can find a lot in Hong Kong. She promised to try at one point though, we will see if she actually does .

From now on Bianca will be helping us to support our shop and write a lot of texts for our website in German and English.

Bianca and I eating Dim Sum in the Chinese Restaurant

we really ordered a lot of food

The whole modes4u.com team in front of the Chinese restaurant

What a nice surprise. Some of our fabrics were printed in last month’s InStyle magazine. InStyle is a really big fashion & lifestyle print magazine in Germany with a run of nearly 500,000. A German Fashion Label made some very cute children’s clothes for the collection Villa Kunterbunt. Two of our fabrics were used in this collection for a cute dress and skirt. Don’t they look incredibly adorable? We can just imagine how children wear the dress made with our gnome fabric or the little cupcake skirt. Thumbs up for this.

Our fabrics in German InStyle magazine

We work with Kokka fabrics closely together, of course it helps that they have an office in Hong Kong. Therefore, we have a very good business relationship with them and visit their office every once in a while to talk in person, discuss future plans and collaborations and give them some feedback we received from our customers regarding their fabrics. Today’s meeting was very important for us because we wanted to discuss the sales of Kokka fabrics in Germany. When we started working with them they told us that some fabrics are not allowed to Germany because another company has the exclusive import rights for those. We agreed to that and followed their rules. After 2 years we became a very good customer for them and they decided to review this arrangement. Alan and I went to their office to discuss this issue. The meeting was very successful, we are now allowed to sell almost all Kokka fabrics to Germany. We are very happy about that and our customers must be even more happy. I got countless emails before asking why we cannot sell those fabrics to Germany.

After the meeting we had a Chinese lunch together with the boss and one more staff and chatted about business, travelling to Japan and other topics. It’s nice when you know your suppliers in person and also know something private about them. It is a lot more fun doing business like that.

Our business is growing constantly and the number of visitors in our online shop and blog is increasing monthly. Until now we used a shared server in Germany for hosting our websites but we are now at a point that our shop has too much traffic for a shared server. Therefore, we decided to invest some money to get our own server. We use All-Inkl from Germany who is a very reliable company for server hosting, we highly recommend them. Their service is great and reliable. They also offer webservers for rent, so we stay with them and only move to a new server. This happened last night and everything went very smooth. Our websites were offline for about 1 hour and after that everything was back up running. We can see already that the sites are much faster and pictures load very quickly. I believe this was a very good investement and makes the shopping experience in our shop even better.

An editor of the German magazine “Creative at Home” contacted me because they are interested in featuring one of our fabrics in their magazine. Isn’t that so cool? We are very excited here. Let’s hope they are really going to use one of our fabrics for their upcoming edition. Yay.

Creative at Home Magazine

Good news everyone, we are in the new “Alles für die Frau” magazine from Germany. They have a deco & style section and our deco tapes were recommended there as a great way to quickly redecorate furniture, home accessoires and gifts. We are so excited about that! This is our first magazine referral for our kawaii shop modes4u. We actually got a few more emails from other magazines as well, let’s hope they are going to print our products and shop as well

We are in the new Alles für die Frau magazine

this is the deco & style section

a closeup of the deco tape recommendation

Today we were contacted by the German Instyle magazine asking us if we allow them to publish some of our deco tapes in their magazine.What a question! Of course! We just sent them some high resolution pictures so they can use them and don’t need to take pictures themselves. Let’s hope they are really going to use our tapes in one of their coming editions. We are SO EXCITED

German Instyle Magazine

Our 1500th online shop order was placed in our shop today! We are so excited here about this. The customer is from Wuppertal, Germany. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! to all our customers! You cannot imagine how happy we are that our hard work is paying off and our shop is getting more popular.

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

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