Hi!
Thank you for reading this blog.
This blog is about me on a journey to find out whether I ~ a maker of things, can use my hands to not only produce products to sell, make a profit, but also create a space where others can do the same.
I have been on this journey for almost 2 years now. It has been a bumpy ride, and I am sure the future will be even bumpier!
I started my company - Ayata Ltd in Auckland, New Zealand in March 2021. It was not a direct reaction to COVID-19, or the lockdowns that followed, although that seemed to have spurred me on. My grandmother - the matriarch of my family passed away 5 years ago, my family have moved back to my hometown after years living in Wellington. I had a school aged child that was beginning to have more independence, and required me less. But most of all, I was dissatisfied with the work I was doing, and who I was doing it for.
My inspiration for making things, fixing things, and my interest in building a company was in my DNA. My Dad owned his own company, and both my parents were creative in their own right. I learnt to make and enjoy creative pursuits at a young age. During college/high school, I was convinced I was going to major in fine arts at university. Instead, I chose Psychology, then Human Resource Management. While working professional roles, I alleviated my dissatisfaction and despair by cooking, baking, and making things. A lot of which are still UFOs (Un-Finished Objects), because I've either over-estimated my skill level, got bored, or didn't want to finish it because then I'll have to find a use for it. The ones I was motivated to finish were always projects that were designed and destined for other people. If I started a project just for myself, it will never get finished.
My original concept for Ayata was a vehicle to share my grandmother's cooking with everyone. She made the best Taiwanese food! Her soup dumplings (湯圓) were the best, better than the retailed ones. Unfortunately, the food safety criteria and lack of a commercial kitchen, as well as my health made me realise that perhaps it wasn't a long-lasting business for me.
Since then, I have put my business aspirations in the backburner and concentrated on developing my professional credentials to re-enter the workforce. During that time, life interrupted, and family dynamics shifted, but I kept my dream alive by researching on YouTube, websites, books and podcasts.
What I have found was inspiring, but also dispiriting. For a creative person to make their passion a profitable enterprise, there were a lot of hurdles to overcome, and a steep learning curve. The product mastery is probably the easiest portion of the whole equation. We have to be a one person business that does everything from sales, finance, marketing, business strategist/CEO and much, much more. The web has made it easier to connect producers and consumers, but it has also created more technical know-how to navigate, in order to find our customers, and succeed. At every step of my research, I have found that as a one person company, the learning is steep, there is a lot of noise to find help, and the success rate is very slim.
It also occurred to me that as a consumer, what is out there in the marketplace is totally dissatisfactory and frustrating. In our current age of crisis (my own term) - climate crisis, conflict crisis (Ukraine with Russia), energy crisis (all of Europe), water crisis (its coming!), food crisis, financial crisis and who knows what else; all the experts say that we need to change our behaviour, but all that's available to us is still the same, just with another layer of bureaucracy over the top.
As a mother and planet lover, I want to buy sustainable products that are made or grown locally. But that is just not possible anymore with giants like Amazon, and countries that mass produce cheaper and less environmentally friendly items like China, India, and other south east asian countries. How are we to compete with them in resources, low wages, plentiful labour (some lacking labour laws), and lack of morals and ethics?
I then flipped the idea on its head and thought of the problem differently. As an immigrant (Taiwanese living in New Zealand), I grew up trying to assimilate into the dominant culture. It gave me a view into different people's barriers in society as well as business. Immigrants and refugees suffer through more barriers than me to succeed, because they have language, visa and work status, and often funding barriers on top of all the other usual barriers citizens face. In New Zealand, ex criminals also have a lot of barriers to find work and get income as well. These people are marginalised in most of our society, and I want to give them a second chance. I am hoping that through sharing the love of making things, I can be of service for anyone that is struggling to find work. At the same time, I can highlight sustainable suppliers, producers, and makers to enlightened consumers, but also allow them to see the humans that all contribute to making their product.
I want to create a space where love is shared between the growers/suppliers, to the makers, to the consumers. Making things is hard enough. I hope to take the business side out of the equation and let makers focus on making, and let them communicate directly with the consumers on what they really want, but also let the makers educate the consumer on the process and length of time it is required to make their bespoke items. In order for this to work, it will be the consumers that need to change their purchasing behaviour, not the makers.
The online purchasing platforms keep thriving because they lead the consumers to believe that faster is better, when in fact, our planet is asking us to slow down, and that mindful and slow will save our planet. I am a big supporter of the Slow Food Movement, and I want to create a revolution to change people's purchasing behaviour.
This is a working progress, and I am writing as I figure this out.
So if you are still interested, stay tuned for more.
Kia ora koutou katoa
(Māori for stay well, everyone)
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