BEHIND THE BRAND – COSMIC SEED
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Meet Kate and Sam. This amazing, young, travelling couple came to join us at the end of last year and it has been an absolute pleasure getting to know them! Every time you pop in to see them they are happy to chat and you end up leaving with a smile (and maybe a new t-shirt!!)
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When did you start your business and how did you come up with the idea?
We started Cosmic Seed back in 2018 – we had both quit our jobs, moved out of our apartment and into our camper van. We were looking for a way to fund our travels around Australia. Both being artists, we wanted to start a business that let us express our creativity and share our art with the world. We had an interest in t-shirts and wearable art and came up with the idea of tie-dying and printing t-shirts that encompassed the message “Free Your Mind”. We wanted our brand to revolve around expressing your inner creativity and individuality and breaking away from the norm – which is exactly what we were doing with our lifestyle by exiting the 9 – 5 grind.
Once we were on the road, we realised it was to difficult to run a business while travelling (how naive we were!). We ended up settling on the Sunshine Coast and starting fresh – learning how to properly run a business and practising all kinds of dying and printing techniques. We spent 2019 perfecting our craft and expanded our business to include kids and women’s clothes as well as custom designs and other products such as hats and bags. Our little project to try and fund our travels has turned into something much bigger than we ever expected – and we have so many ideas of where to take it in the future!
What does your daily life look like and where do you find the time to create?
Our daily life now revolves around running our business, creating and coming up with new ideas. We are completing a Cert IV in New Small Business and spend a lot of our time learning. We also run our online store which involves completing online orders and keeping up our social media presence. The rest of our time is spent coming up with new designs, creating new products and exploring different artistic techniques. In our downtime we love getting out into nature, making music, cooking, and doing other types of art.
What keeps you going when things are tough or you have a lack of motivation?
Our main source of motivation is making our business as successful as it can be and creating an awesome future for ourselves. Seeing every step of improvement and reflecting on how far we’ve come is also very motivating for us. Back when we started we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, and our designs had a lot of room for improvement. Seeing what we’ve been able to accomplish in two years reminds us that the possibilities for the future are endless, and that’s really exciting!
What is the main thing you have learnt while running a small business or passion project?
We have learnt so much – marketing, accounting, the ins and outs of dying and printing, we’ve become experts at using design computer programs, leant how to build a website, and how to run a successful market stall!
But overall the biggest lesson we’ve learnt is that running a business is really hard work! We have had to edit our lifestyle and habits, become more determined, more motivated and more goal orientated. It has taken a huge change in mindset and we are extremely proud of how far we have come.
What does each sale mean to you?
Each and every sale puts a huge smile on our faces and fills us with gratitude! It shows us that people out there appreciate and love what we do enough to spend their hard-earned money on it! Each sale validates what we are doing and gives us hope that we can turn this business into the huge success that we dream it could be. Doing the Sunshine Coast Collective Markets has been the most amazing experience (we started December 2019), because really lovely people would come in and be genuinely interested in what we’re about. We enjoyed interacting with customers so much and can’t wait until we can start the markets back up again.
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