OUR STORY
In 2017 we had two small children. Honor, our daughter, was 2 and a half and our son, Haven, was a newborn. I had a handmade earring business that was doing really well and Andy was working as a surveyor for a local civil contracting company. We were both travelling through a life-altering season after the traumatic birth and near loss of our son. The experience sent my thought-life into complete disarray. We questioned everything; the people we invested time in, what we ate, our possessions. Everything we once believed in became a big question mark and we felt the need to reevaluate.
Moving forward, we made a promise to each other that anything we did together or individually had to contribute, count and be purposeful. We sent that off to the Universe and we decided that we weren’t going to do anything else with our money, our time or our life, unless it did something good.
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One afternoon I was at the park with the kids, I called Andy and pitched him the idea of a coffee cup. He came home that night, we put the kids to bed and Andy went into his office and opened up his old, super clunky MacBook. Within 20 minutes he had drawn up the Luxey Cup as we know it today.
We fully committed to this idea. We put all our savings into it, we maxed out every credit card we had and we begged and borrowed from our family. We needed to put a prototype together from scratch, which was an extremely exhaustive process. The tooling was extremely expensive and it was a process of trial and error. This made for a long and expensive road, which went on for about a year.
Around the middle of 2018 we got our prototypes back and they weren’t perfect, but we had NO money left and there was no opportunity to get more. We had to bite the bullet and start our Kick Starter campaign. We were relying on people to preorder the product, which would give us the capital to launch the company. We had 30 days to get $40 000 and it was an ‘all or nothing’ campaign. If we didn’t get the $40K we got nothing at all. The pressure was a lot higher than other campaigns in that same space. Amazingly, 30 Days later we made just over $42 000, which to us was just incredible!
In January 2019 Andy went to China for a month to start the manufacturing process. He stayed until all the fine details were settled, which ended up being around a month. Even after that time, it still took us 7 excruciatingly long months to land that first shipment here in Australia. Once they were here the response was insane. We sold out of the first container in less than 2 weeks. We then released our second container, which only took 3 weeks to sell out. Things were moving incredibly fast.
September 2019 and we needed to find a space to continue running our growing business, so we moved our business and ourselves to Noosa. We lived on top of the warehouse in a care takers quarters while the warehouse was downstairs. Within a couple of months we took on the lease for the warehouse next door and our business really took off from there.
We carried on like this until COVID hit. After that we didn’t know what the future would look like. The pandemic put a question mark over our importing abilities and we made the decision to bring half of the manufacturing home to Australia.
Easter 2021 we moved both of our warehouses down to Coolum Beach. The huge space meant we could receive our machine and we finally started to produce our own silicon in December 2021. Now we have anywhere from 5-7 staff members depending on the season and we make all our own silicon here on the Sunshine Coast.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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