Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - September/October 2020

107 UP AND COMING Bee-autiful stationery Charlotte Allen, co-founder of Sleepy Bee Studio, explains the intricacies of the stationery company, and what it means to have won a prestigious award so early on in the brand’s lifespan Tell me a bit about how the label was started. What was the inspiration? My husband & I (Gavin and Charlie) founded Sleepy Bee Studio in May 2019. We are a creative design studio based in Cambridge, specialising in premium stationery, art & gifts. My background is in buying, illustration and product design, and Gav is a graphic designer and artworker. The name came about because I managed to nab our spare room that we had just re-decorated and turn it into a studio. The door looked a little bare, so I found a beautiful brass bee charm that I decided to stick on the front of the studio door with a tiny ‘busy’ sign beneath it. I was pretty proud of my efforts until Gav saw it, laughed, and said I’m more of a sleepy bee than a busy bee (I’m partial to three-hour naps) and so the name came from there. One of our goals as a business with the stationery side of things is to get people to slow things down a touch and take more time for themselves in terms of correspondence. It promotes mindfulness in the same way that drawing, painting and other crafts can be therapeutic and relieve anxiety, so too does handwriting. That’s not to say we think current technology is bad at all, it would be very hypocritical of us to tell people to shun technology, seeing as we depend on social media to promote our products and we’d be lost as a business without it. It’s about getting the balance right with technology whilst not losing the traditional way of writing. There is still a need for beautiful tactile correspondence that will be kept and cherished forever. How were the initial products developed and what was the response? We were born in Cambridge and Gav and I still live here now, so it seemed right for our hometown to be the inspiration for the first collection of themes, aptly named Cambridge, Darwin, Botanical & Stargazer. Over a series of weeks, I drew all of the illustrations needed from doing several trips into town. For instance, with all of the Darwin illustrations, they were drawn from specimens on display at the Museum of Zoology (some of the beetle drawings are specimens that Darwin himself collected!) For the majority of the illustrations in Cambridge, Darwin & Stargazer, I used the pointillism technique of doing hundreds of tiny dots to create each illustration. This happened because with the clouds in Stargazer the solid lines I started using just didn’t look delicate enough. I changed it to a series of dots and it really suited the look, so I went with it for the remaining themes. The response to the products was really positive and as we also sell at the All Saints Craft Market in Cambridge we were able to get feedback directly from customers, which was lovely. What challenges did you face and how were they overcome when starting the business? 