November Vendor Spotlight: Cotton Candy Sutajio
We are 2 Japanese girls living in Montreal who love cute stuff!! :) We both always wanted to try handmaking cute accessories and share them with everyone! We just started and we are a very small brand but we are super excited to share our products and story with the world.
What inspired you to start a business? We first started making unique accessories we want to wear and we received multiple positive feedbacks from our friends that we decided to start our brand and share our accessories with more people.
How did you come up with your business name? When we are thinking about the name of our brand, it was very hard and at some point, we are asking each other what is our favorite food and one of us said cotton candy haha We thought "cotton candy" is actually a super cute name so we name ourselves "Cotton Candy Sutajio (Sutajio means studio in Japanese)".
What is your favorite thing that you make and why? We make several accessories but we love earrings! Usually making them takes a lot of time and we almost consider them as our child:) Especially, the umbrella and butterfly ones are super cute but take a lot of time haha
Tell us about the progress you've made since you first started We are pretty new still, however as making products every day we feel that we improved our skills a lot and now we have a lot of people supporting us and receiving messages from them always encourages us so much!
Describe your creative process Usually, anytime we have any ideas, we draw a rough sketch of the idea in the notebook and start thinking about colors and all that. But even we draw details in the note, as we make we always want to change some part or add more design etc...
What is the best part of being an entrepreneur? We do what we love so even the result is coming very slowly, we can keep going and going!!
What is the hardest part of running your own business? You have to do everything by yourself including creating items, advertising them, shipping them, and more... Always more things to do!
What are your business goals for the future? We want more people to know about us!! Rather than just making sales, we want to connect, share and build relationships with our clients/friends:)
What's your personality like? Nanami: I am Aries female, so when I decide to start something, I just really focus to go toward my goal, just keep keep keep going! So passionate about what I love and what I believe in. I don't hear people’s opinions since I believe in myself. I love video games as well lol
Kurumi: I am Kurumi! I'd say my personality is very shy but friendly at the same time (I know it's confusing haha). I am always curious about new things and get inspired from outside a lot:) I am really the type if I don't do what I like, I get bored and want to quit right away. That's why I am really happy that we have Cotton Candy Sutajio and I get to be creative and also meet lots of new people!!:)
How do you balance your job and your creative work? After work, we both start working on our brands right away usually. It was hard at the beginning but it became routine now:)
What do you care about the most when you take pictures of products?
We take pictures only under the sun because it looks much better! So we set an alarm in the morning so that we don't miss the sun and check if it’s sunny! If it is sunny, we will go ahead and take pictures and set some colorful background to go with it and if it is rainy, we will just go back to sleep haha