Yvonne is the creative heart of the business. From designing new products to creating customer artwork, she brings every personalised design to life with incredible attention to detail.
Cassie looks after marketing, customer service, social media and all the day-to-day business operations. If you've sent us a message, asked a question online or seen one of our Facebook posts, chances are you've been chatting with her.
Brigette combines her graphic design skills with a passion for creating beautiful keepsakes. She helps turn customer ideas into meaningful gifts while keeping production running smoothly behind the scenes.
Peter is our unpaid hero, solver of problems and fixer of things.
The man that brings in coffee, changes light globes, squishes bugs.
Our biggest critic and our biggest supporter
Our Biggest Bloopers (So Far!)
Over the last 10 years we've created more than 84,000 personalised gifts, invested in equipment, launched new product ranges and grown beyond anything we could have imagined. But let's be honest... we've also made some spectacular mistakes along the way. Here are three of our favourites.
1. The Wedding Business That Lasted About Five Minutes
In late 2019, we decided we were going to conquer the wedding industry.
We launched a completely separate business with its own branding, website, marketing materials, product range and stock. We invested tens of thousands of dollars preparing for our big debut at Australia's largest bridal expo in Sydney in early 2020. The launch was a huge success. We generated loads of interest, made plenty of sales and took deposits for weddings booked months and even years in advance.
Then Covid arrived.
As weddings and social events were cancelled across Australia, our exciting new wedding business came to a grinding halt almost overnight. We felt terrible for our customers and re-made products free of charge whenever weddings were postponed, only to have many of them postponed again and again. The silver lining? During the quieter period we began designing educational games and baby milestone discs, which unexpectedly became some of our most successful wholesale products.
When the wedding industry eventually recovered, we were all a little too traumatised (and busy) to jump back in.
If anyone needs a few hundred white coat hangers, though, we know where to find some.
2. The Time We Almost Burnt Down The Factory
Less than a week after moving into our factory, our brand-new $24,000 laser cutter arrived. We were very excited. The laser cutter was very excited too. A lapse in supervision while cutting glitter acrylic resulted in a fire inside the machine.
Thankfully the factory itself survived, but the laser cutter was a total loss.
While insurance covered the machine, Covid created another problem. At the time there were virtually no large-bed laser machines available anywhere in Australia thanks to supply shortages and a surge in people starting side businesses from home. After a frantic search, we eventually located a second-hand machine in Melbourne. However, we were unable to create laser-cut or engraved products for almost six weeks.
The lesson? Never underestimate glitter's ability to cause chaos.
3. The Great Kylie Minogue Clock Disaster
This story still hurts.
A few years ago, while attending a trade fair, we found what seemed like the bargain of the century. A supplier was clearing hundreds of glass clocks featuring a printed image of 1990s Kylie Minogue. The clocks were incredibly cheap and we thought we'd found a genius way to avoid importing blank glass clocks from overseas.
Our brilliant plan was simple. Buy the clocks. Peel Kylie off. Print our own personalised designs. Easy.
Except Kylie did not want to be removed. Every single clock had to be dismantled, soaked in paint thinners, individually scraped by hand, washed, dried and then reassembled before we could even begin personalising them.
What we thought would save us money ended up costing us hundreds of hours of labour and a significant portion of our sanity.
To this day, mention Kylie Minogue in the factory and you'll notice a few nervous twitches around the room.