Author

modes4u

I’m Sandra, the founder, and I’m originally from Austria. I moved to Hong Kong in the 2000’s to complete my further studies here, then sought out to start my own business in this wonderfully vibrant city. As a result, modeS4u was born, and it's been running for over a decade now! We hope you enjoy reading out blog! If you have any questions or would like to get in touch, please feel free to email us anytime at: info@modes4u.com Thanks, Sandra & the modes4u team

Our Christmas Page is online

by modes4u August 11, 2011

‘What? Are you crazy? It’s August!’, you might say when reading this. But believe it or not, we have been selling quite a few Christmas items over the last weeks. That’s why we decided to put our Christmas category online on modes4u.com, even though it’s early and we’re still in the middle of summer. WE KNOW. We will be adding more and more products to this category over the next weeks and months, so feel free to take a look whenever you feel like checking out festive fabrics, deco tapes, stamps and more. And don’t we all know the situation when Christmas is approaching incredibly fast and you get all stressed out about it? So take the opportunity and start getting things done early this year.

Our Christmas Page is online

August 11, 2011 0 comment

New at modes4u.com: wall stickers

by modes4u August 10, 2011

From now on you can find a new product in our shop: wall stickers. They are really hip at the moment, as they are just a great way to decorate your home, office and more without having to paint anything. You just stick them to your wall or furniture and can remove them if you don’t want them anymore. Really easy and lots of room for creativity. We start off with 2 cute designs by Otogicco from Japan, which show adorable fairy tale scenes and charcters. For example there isLittle Red Riding Hood, Pinocchioor Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

cute fairy tale wall sticker Little Red Riding Hood

cute Little Red Riding Hood wall sticker wolf Otogicco

August 10, 2011 0 comment

Photographer Interviews

by modes4u August 10, 2011

We are looking for a photographer for our company at the moment because we have so many new products coming in almost daily and we have trouble catching up with taking photos of all of them. Therefore, we decided to hire a photographer who will be lucky to take photos of cute products all day long. Who doesn’t want such job? I would definitely do it if I wouldn’t be so busy with other things in our company. We will be busy interviewing candidates all day long. Keeping our fingers crossed that we will find someone quick.

some of the products waiting to have their photo taken

August 10, 2011 0 comment

Moving our office and warehouse

by modes4u May 1, 2011

This weekend we were moving our office from Kwai Fong to Fo Tan. It took us 3 days to move because we had so much stuff, especially so many products to move. We also had to be very careful with packing the products to make sure nothing gets broken, bent or crushed. It was a really exhausting weekend but we finally made it. Thanks to all our friends who helped us moving, without them we couldn’t have done it. Now we have a much bigger office and warehouse with lots of space for new cute products for our shop 🙂 Here are some pictures I took during our move:

before the move

our office was quite cramped already

my office table was befind a shelf filled up with bags

our move has officially started

slowly shelves are getting empty

Lok was busy packing products into boxes

we packed most products in big boxes from the Hong Kong Post

the office is almost empty

waiting for the elevator

Alan is disassembling the furniture

in the evening we had a nice dinner with everyone helping us

Thanks for helping guys!!!

May 1, 2011 0 comment

Signing the new contract

by modes4u April 21, 2011

Today we signed the new contract for our bigger office I was writing about a couple of days ago. We are really excited about this move because we ran out of space in our current office and we plan to stock a lot more products. Signing the contract was quite some torture for me because the landlord is an elderly Chinese man who doesn’t speak a single word English. Additional, he was super slow with reading all the docouments, signing etc. and he had lots of very strange requests. For example, he took a photo of the keys and started to explain to Alan every single key (of course he mixed them up and struggled to identify them). I was so dumbfounded, I had to take a photo. My butt was hurting because I was sitting on a cheap chair for a whole hour already. I was so glad when this whole procedure was over and we finally had the keys. Next week we will move our office. I will definitely take some photos for you guys again.

explanation of each single key

now, which one is which one??? hahaha

April 21, 2011 0 comment

Looking for a new office

by modes4u April 7, 2011

Our office lease is almost finished and we are looking for a new, bigger place to rent. We were checking out many places, most were unacceptable because too dirty/ugly/old or too overpriced. It is really hard to find a suitable, nice looking office in Hong Kong. Rent is ridiculously high in Hong Kong and the office quality often pretty poor. However, today we were lucky and found the right place. It is in Fo Tan, an industrial district of Hong Kong and conveniently located near the highway and the train station. The office is 3 times as big as our current office but we really need the bigger space. Here are some pictures we took today:

this is the new office space

we have windows along 2 sides of the office which is very nice

the entrance to the boss office

this room needs lots of work done before we can move in

unfortunately it comes with this ugly cupboard

April 7, 2011 1 comment

Decorating our office with deco tapes

by modes4u April 3, 2011

Today, we had some fun decorating our office furniture with some of our cute and fun deco tapes. We used the tapes to decorate our shelves, tables and computer monitors. It was really fun! There are so many creative ways to use those deco tapes and we think our furniture looks so much better now 😉

one of our computer monitors decorated with Rilakkuma tape

fabric shelf with deco tape decoration

we used a different deco tape for each shelf

close up of one shelf

froggy deco tape

San-X deco tape

decorating our office table

cute pink deco tape along the side of our packing table

April 3, 2011 0 comment

Rilakkuma at Circle K in Hong Kong

by modes4u April 2, 2011

Circle K (a shop similar to 7-11) has a special Rilakkuma promotion going on at the moment. For every 20 HKD (~US$2.6) spent, you get a small sealed package. Inside this package is a San-X sticker with a number printed on it. You also get a paper sheet at the shop where you can stick those stickers on. Once you have stickers worth 100 points collected, you can get a free gift. You can choose between a San-X luggage tag or 2 different kinds of pens. If you collect stickers worth 10,000 points, you get a big Rilakkuma plush for free. We are collecting already but it will take a while to get to 100 points. If we get the gift we will have a giveaway here on our blog and give it to one of our readers. Shall we choose one of the luggage tags or one of the pens?

these are the prizes you can get

paper sheet to collect the stickers

this is the small package you get with the sticker inside

April 2, 2011 1 comment

Bye Bye Alibaba!

by modes4u April 1, 2011

We have been a Gold supplier on Alibaba.com for 2 years now and we decided to stop promoting our wholesale business there. We are just too busy with our existing customers and our retail shop and don’t have the time anymore to accept any new wholesale customers. Therefore, we decided to shut down our Alibaba Gold supplier account and focus on our online shop instead. I am sure we will not regret this decision.

we got this Gold Supplier badge from Alibaba

April 1, 2011 0 comment

Debika Japan visits our office

by modes4u March 22, 2011

Today Sonny, who is the Sales Manager from Debika Japan, came to visit us in our office. He flew from Japan to Hong Kong just to visit us and show us their newest products. Isn’t that nice of him? Debika is making lots of clay products which we are very interested in selling. Right now, we only sell one of their clay sets. With this set you can make your own jewelry charms using clay and some cute accessories.
But Debika has a lot more to offer including making your own erasers, soap, pottery + they have all the necessary accessories like molds, whipped cream clay, rhinestones and something really awesome: fragrances! You can use those small bottles to drip some liquid on to your finished project and it smells like maple, vanilla, chocolate or any of the other fragrances they have. I tested the maple fragrance, it smelled so good! Sonny told us that they use real food ingredients, so if you are hungry, you can even eat it 😉
He also showed us some new products which will come out next month. The items I am most excited about are some clay finishes. You can make your clay look like wood, or a stone-finish, or a rough street look, metallic look etc. It really looks awesome. We are very excited to start working with Debika together and sell their products in our shop. I will keep you informed here on our blog once the products are available in our shop. Stay tuned for more news!

Sonny and me and lots of clay products

March 22, 2011 4 comments