  AJJTAL మారికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికికిక it's not too bad with yours today right nice what's this little book oh we have our dapo notes notebooks that we collaborated with an artist on to hand me these that we um we designed the cover for okay nice can we chat some more on this sure let's do that awesome thanks again king so much for agreeing to have this conversation to me yet okay okay we'll see about that we'll see how it goes but um yeah i had you know a little pre-conversation with you and and you express you know how passionate you about you know expressing yourself finding discovering yourself i should say through creativity and at tell us how do how do you do that they're different ways but for me specifically i like to make things so whatever it is i love to paint i love to do crafts i love to sew i mean as you could tell i just i i i find it so calming to just find my zone and just do whatever i feel like doing i literally will find something on the floor and find several several different things to do with it and i just i feel like that process of creativity is just something that everybody needs to have a little bit of in their lives because it creates a level of balance that we don't have every day so for me i just i absolutely love making okay so when did you start discovering yourself it's been a while it's it's been a continuous effort for me but i could say over the last couple of years i've really honed in on discovering myself because as an entrepreneur i find i find that a lot of us tend to lose ourselves in our professionalism and our personalized take a back burner so somebody asks you what do you do for your job and it's like i'm this i'm that person i i i could do this and you call all of your accolades but then when it's time to ask what what do you like who are you as a person how is me you know you you have you really lose touch of who you are so it's i feel like for me i had to take a step back and really think about who is this person what am i trying to do what is this all about because in trying to accomplish everything else around bandbox and everything that we were trying to do with the business and the brand to grow it we sort of lost touch of why we were doing it and the message the messaging behind the business and the brand so yes gim how did your name your your name for your brand bandbox what does that stand for bandbox means the equivalent of well-groomed and sophisticated i when i started three names ago ten years ago i came up with everything around the same iteration but for me bandbox i wanted it to have a unisex feel so i couldn't go with that because that's too masculine and i couldn't go with chic because that's too feminine i wanted something really in the middle but that didn't feel like clothing or dressing because i knew it was always about expression and creativity and really just loving whatever you're doing you know so i found the meaning of bandbox as a hardbox which is actually round and it was used back in the 1920s when rich people would dress up everybody would get a hat made for them to look really good so there was an old saying you look like you step out of a bandbox which means that you look dressed to the nine you look fantastic so i was like that's it bandbox and i love the the ring of it i love the oxymoron of the fact that it says box but it's actually round so it just it felt like the perfect fit for me very nice i'm impressed so gim tell us more about your life what do you specialise in we have our signature mood cards a mood card just like what i'm wearing is essentially our statement piece it's our signature product that's supposed to symbolise your freedom of expression and you just doing something really different we started making them really big actually bigger than this when we designed it was supposed to be a really grand piece to stand out by itself and to really make a statement that hey i'm not here to fit in i'm here to stand out so that's where the mood card came from and we started making the iterations we have the long weekend mood card which is a style like what i'm wearing and the meantime mood card which is a little different as you can tell the names are around like feelings of really taking time for yourself and your own expression your own time so that's how we like to to make sure that people feel around our products but we're excited to bring out some really new designs and and really unique one-of-a-kind pieces that would really take in and hone in on the name mood card and the concept that we really want people to feel nice and you have your mood cards going on but i see you have books as well it's a mood card so tell us tell us what what would you have in store i'm a designer at heart i just love making things when the notebook thing happened it literally was serendipitous this i i saw this designer dapper notes and he's from ujz i saw him on instagram and i was like oh my gosh i have to collaborate with this artist what he does is he makes handmade pocket notebooks but every cover is designed by an artist so literally you just send in your your design your collaborates and we go to decide what the fabric was and what the inside was and because i'm horrible at making those types of decisions i came up with six designs and i just made all six designs the design so it looks like a bit of an heirloom quilt type look and the the fabric is actually a crushed velvet so it's really soft to the touch it's iridescent so depending on how you look at it in the light it looks a little different and every notebook looks different because once it's cut down there's literally no way to replicate it and that's one of the things i love about what i do and that's one of the things i love about how we design it's just about taking things that you wouldn't expect and just going with the flow going with how you feel and just expressing yourself because it's okay in art there's really no wrong answer it's how you feel what you do and who doesn't like it that's that's them and them again i like that so you have you you use the tell me you use african print use the the madras what else is it what inspires you do you have any particular you know patterns are you into or into any and everything it's not any and everything i feel like i'm really drawn to unique and geometric style patterns um i i'm not necessarily drawn to african fabric either i just really love cotton because for the mood cause it's it's important to me that the fabric is breathable so that it doesn't hold in heat and start irritating around your neck every woman knows the struggle of just having that heat sitting there especially when you live in the Caribbean like that's not a struggle i want for anybody so that's why we don't put any metals in this or anything and as you can tell it's really lightweight so for me i wanted to make sure that it's it's something comfortable to wear so that's why we gravitated towards african fabric because it's a lot of just black type colors you know it's very loud it's very Caribbean it's very a bunch of colors nobody should put together that's just together so it just felt very good to me i had no idea that african fabric was a thing i just i gravitated towards the fabric and then i started using it so for me it's just about print and and making sure that it fits whatever we're going to do with it because i won't necessarily use a crush velvet for a stock item like a mood cord because for me if i make that now it's just going to keep you hot so unless it's a special type of order where somebody says okay i'm comfortable with this this is what i prefer this is what i like then i'll do that but for me it's it's it's about just coloring people it's it's very selfish but for me i just i love taking my world of color and how i surround myself with a lot of colors and i understand how it's it impacts your emotions and your everyday life so i want to bring that to people so they could feel the beautiful world of color and how the expressiveness of that helps with your everyday life awesome sabon wo bagai where can we find you if we're interested in buying any of your pieces your beautiful pieces at that um we have a facebook store an online store and an instagram store our handles are all at the bandboxofficial and thebandboxofficial.com we also started a new youtube channel that i'm very excited about where we share our story and we share different techniques and avenues of people to help them express themselves in their own way because expressing yourself doesn't necessarily mean to wear a mood cord as much as i would love you to you could color we teach you how to do our techniques we teach you how to just channel your creativity in your own whether you like to cook whether you like to plant in your garden whether you like to go for walks or just chill on the beach i i really love just helping people embrace their creativity and embrace their self-expression so you could find us over there as well at bandbox thank you so much king messy appeal it was certainly a pleasure chatting with you on belty cozy yes belty cozy you are messy ashai a lot