The First Ever Blog Post - New Studio and New Collections

Hi Wonder Gang!

Welcome to our first blog post! We celebrated our 1 year wonderversary this month and thought now would be the time to start a blog to record our journey. I always wished we took more photos and videos when we first started out. Some of you know the days of the white board chaos and I wish I could share more photos of that time. 

With the blog I hope to share our behind the scenes of the business and our lives. Some blogs will be more business oriented, and some will be about our lives as silly girlies in Japan. And years from now, we’ll be able to look back at our blog posts and see where we were. If we keep at it that is. You know how bad Cres and I are with being consistent when it comes to social media or anything for that matter. Anyways, before I start on our first post, I want to say thank you to everyone who has ever watched the live stream, purchased from us, liked a video/photo, or just visited the website. Our lives have completely changed in the last year. We have always talked about how we wanted to start a business together as sisters and the fact that we're now doing it is mind-blowing to me. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. We love all of you. 

The First Ever Blog Post 

For the first time in New Wonder herstory, we live streamed for 5 days straight! That’s 30 appointments in total!! The reason for the 5-day live stream is because we got the February preorders in and we’re moving to a new studio!! It’s the exact same apartment layout in the same building but we still have some preparation work to do. Thanks to Cres and her hubby, the floors are being installed this week. The apartment originally had brown wood flooring and it makes the room look much darker on live. The white flooring instantly brightens the room and it just looks more aesthetically pleasing for the set up. 

        

Now that the floors are almost done, we’ve moved on to the “what are we doing with the walls!?” phase. Should we keep it? Should we add wallpaper? Can we add wallpaper with this type of wall? How is the wallpaper going to stick when the walls are bumpy!! I don’t know what we’re going to do yet, but I know it will turn out great. Right?

- New Collections - 

The new Sentimental Circus, Summiko Gurashi, and Pokantotan have finally arrived and hit the shelves this past week. Thank goodness we were prepared this time and got a bunch of stock for the shop because you guys really be clearing us out every time we get a new collection. The new collections will be listed on the website soon so stay tuned! If you haven’t seen the new collection, let me tell you, you’re missing out!! Look at how adorable these are and this is just a small part of the Sentimental Circus collection. 

By the way, does everyone know the story of Sentimental Circus? I came across their lore today and knew I had to share!

Sentimental Circus is a group of old plushies and toys that were forgotten and left in corners of rooms and streets. The forgotten plushies and toys sneak away together to form the secret circus at night. Shappo is the leader of the circus! Have you ever wondered what is in Shappo’s hat? It’s actually needles, threads, and tricks. Shappo is skilled in handicrafts and fixed up they own body when it needed TLC.  And the juggling master Toto was actually made by Shappo too!

Sentimental Circus was first released in September 2010 and the first collection “Black Antique” was released in October the same year. The most newest collection we just got was the 35^th collection.

The Black Antique collection was very small and only had 2 notepads, 2 letter pads, stickers, sticky notes, keychain plushies, pencil pouch, 2 tote bags and a cushion.

I was able to find some photos of the items!

While looking at the older collections I realized that the makeup pouch I’ve been using for over a decade is the pouch from the 2011 October collection “Cube Circus”. I tried looking for other items from the collection but didn’t have much luck. I was only able to find a ring notebook and the pouch. None were available to purchase.

My Pouch :)

If I’m not mistaken, Cres is the one who gifted me the pouch. I don’t remember why or if it was just something I took from her. But I’ve never been able to replace it for some reason. And now that I get to do this as my job, I don’t think I ever will. Unless the zipper breaks. It would be extremely impossible to use a pouch with a broken zipper.

 Finding out the story and characters of Sentimental Circus was so much fun and it made me connect to the characters even more. I would love to continue to share some of the lore and characters of the brands we have at New Wonder. Maybe for our next blog I’ll share some information about Pokantotan or do a full character list for Sentimental Circus and their story. Let me know what you’d like to read about and share your thoughts about our first ever blog :)

Talk to you soon,

Rachel

New Wonder