Good morning my wonderful Chit Chat Tuesday readers! How are we all doing this morning? Fabulous as always I hope! Well, after a whirlwind week, I had a whirlwind of a weekend! It was all fun and games, but I am waiting for the moment I am going to crash! Live for the weekends I keep telling myself!
I hope you all had wonderful weekends with the special ladies in your lives! I was very lucky to spend my Saturday with Mamma H who came down for the weekend. We spent the day café hopping, getting our nails painted and hitting our ultimate fave restaurant – the breakfast club! It’s become our usual and for those who know me I love breakfast! It’s the key to my heart for sure!!
This week on CCT I have Kaisa from children’s rainwear brand el Rhey.
So, enough gassing from me, let’s get to it! Kaisa, thank you so much for joining me and the CCT readers on todays show! Can you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself…
Good morning everyone! My name is Kaisa and I’m originally from Estonia. My parents are business owners, so I was lucky to learn a lot from them when growing up! They were also a huge inspiration to me too.
I lived in the US for a bit but I am now based in UK, which is where I have been for the past five and a half years.
I’ve actually got quite a varied background from journalism to marketing, and I did a business degree in UK. I think all that has helped me to set up el RHEY, because in any business good communication is essential. Especially for us, who have business partners from all around the world and we need to still collaborate effectively as if we were in the same room. (I’m also a little bit mad about coffee and travelling if you would like to know a random fact!)
I love a random fact! I am also mad for travelling so I am with you on that one! Did you always know you wanted to go in to fashion?
I always knew I wanted to start my own business and I have always been passionate about fashion. However, putting the two together came later as a great positive surprise!
I saw an opportunity, it felt right and I went for it. I then needed to find the perfect person to collaborate with and that was my sister Heleliis who is the designer of all our beautiful products and branding. She has always been in design and fashion and worked alongside various fashion designers like Ivo Nokkolo in the Baltics. I admire her sense of style, understanding of colours, materials, shapes and how to create completely original designs…….AND I guess, she trusted me with the business side of things enough too. The great thing is – we can always be completely honest with each other and I have learned so much about fashion through this experience! It’s a fascinating beautiful world of endless opportunities!
Honesty and trust is the key! Once that is gone it’s hard! Why children’s fashion?
Children’s Fashion is fun and we can be quite creative with what we do. The first lightbulb moment we had was when we came up with ColourMe Wellies® idea. Heleliis’ daughter An-Ly was the inspiration for this product, who was 7 years old at that time and was mad about colouring in animals. So the progression from there just came naturally to us and for the brand.
That’s so nice that her daughter was the inspiration! What made you decide to set the brand up?
Heleliis and I both felt that the time was right! I guess we were at that stage where you think ‘Just start from somewhere and the rest will follow’. I think we have a good deal of trust in each other’s capabilities too! We knew we could leave the other to take care of the other side of the business and being sisters helped.
I love that you just went for it! Good for you! Tell us about the brand and it’s ethos…
Everything we do is based on our personal values. The el RHEY Kids label represents original and stylish children’s rainwear that is Fun Fresh and Creative. We believe that it is so important to encourage creativity in everyone, especially children. Everyone wants to feel happy and original self-expression is such a big contributor in that. Knowing this, shouldn’t we all teach our children to look for originality and creativity in their lives? In addition, as children go through various stages of development, they benefit hugely from activities or things that engage their mind in new or creative ways. That’s why we loved the ColourMe Wellies concept from the start and decided to create that as our first product.
We also want to be inspiring with our products. Children are incredibly observant and learn from their surroundings and things they have contact with. If you think back to your childhood, you will most certainly remember a specific toy or piece of clothing very vividly. All these things have an effect on us, even though we may not realise or think about it all the time. So creative products may actually inspire people later on to do something or start something because they left a positive impact in their childhood. It may not be always obvious, but coming from a creative family and an artist father, I know I am still inspired by my childhood where I saw him paint and make sculptures and all the hours I then spent on trying to copy that in my own way. It’s the little things sometimes that end up inspiring us the most.
I completely agree with you! The simplest things can have the biggest effect on us! What makes it different to other rainwear brands?
We have our own original style. We don’t try to copy others, instead we make it fun, creative and use high quality materials and components. El RHEY Kids is all about fashion mixed with high quality that is not compromised. We put a lot of thought and care into each of our products.
What’s coming up for the brand in 2015?
2015 is very exciting for us! We have just started a collaboration with a distributor in the USA. So we will be selling over at New York very soon! We are also proud to say that Igloo Kids in London will be shortly stocking our products in their stores. So London and New York in 2015 is pretty big for us!
This week actually we are launching our second product – ColourMe Brollies™ that are colour-changing umbrellas for kids. They change from white to bursting with colours in rain, like magic! We love them ourselves haha and when we did focus groups with kids then they really enjoyed the fact that it changes colour, plus they didn’t break or go upside down even when the kids had a fierce umbrella fight! There is again two designs – Moth and Zebra that match with the wellies, so you can get a matching set is the idea.
We have some other exciting things coming up this year from el RHEY, but they are still in development right now, so I can’t reveal too much yet……Just that it’s worth keeping an eye on the brand!
Wooo wooo I love it when there is a lot of exciting things going on! That’s fab that you’re launching a new brand this week! If you could do a collaboration with anyone who would it be?
Well, we are actually looking for collaborators and distributors all around the world right now to sell and represent the brand.
So it’s all happening for you guys ATM! Ok, so I need to ask…Do you like the rain?
Absolutely!! Love the rain! …and I also like to remain dry in it, so good rainwear is a must for me!
I completely agree as I feel the cold BIG TIME! So, for me – staying dry and warm is essential!
Kaisa, thank you so much for joining me on CCT today! I t has been great having you on the show and getting to hear about your background and el RHEY! Best of luck with the launch of ColourMe Brollies this week! I wish you the best of luck and will look forward to hearing all about the exciting things that are coming up for you!
Join me next week for lots more chinwagging and gossip <3 Kate xox
Click here to find out more about el RHEY Colour Me range.
