We collaborated with Tarta Gelatina to create our beautiful cushion covers. This is our very first collaboration with designers. We absolutely enjoyed working with this very talented duo! The only regret: we didn't get to meet them in person because of the covid. So we have chatted a bit virtually ;-)

Tarta Gelatina (Paz and Marcel) 🍰: Hi friends, how are you?

Re-leaf (Steph and JB) 🌸: Hello you two, we are fine :-) And you?

🍰 We’re fine, thank you :)

 

🍰 How are things going with Re-leaf?

🌸 Everything is going great, a bit slow but great! Every time we get the chance to meet customers, the reviews are super positive. That’s the only thing that matters for us. 

 

🌸 You started an interior inspiration Instagram account during the first lockdown. Shortly after, you created Tarta Gelatina and it's a hit! What is your secret?

🍰 Our secret is not having a social life, haha, for many months we’ve been just working, we both have full-time jobs (just like you, right?), and as you may know that requires a huge mental and physical effort to balance between both worlds. But we’re happy with it, running our own business is very fun and rewarding, so we enjoy staying up until (very) late at night.

 

🍰 If our previous assumptions were right, how do you balance your FT jobs with running your own business? Any tips that you can share with us? ;)

🌸 It's not always easy, but we are lucky enough to have full-time jobs that give us the flexibility to manage Re-leaf. I try as much as possible to simplify my life by scheduling my posts for Instagram. I don't care about my hours. Sometimes I lose a lot of them because the expected result is not satisfying. So I have to start all over again. Lately, I decided to redo all the pictures of the website to unify the style of the photos and especially the background. It's a crazy job! We don't have just ten different products on the website but hundreds. My only tips: love what you do! Because when you love what you do, you don't count! Right?

 

🌸 You are also full-time if I am not mistaken. How do you manage to combine both?

🍰 That’s correct. Although, we’re not as lucky as you to have very flexible jobs ;) So, during the day we take mini breaks to keep our Instagram active and answer top priority emails, and then at night, we pack orders, design and prototype new products, and do admin stuff. We also work on weekends, but always try to take at least one day off to see friends and go out for drinks and nice food 😋

But as you said, what keeps us going is that we really love what we do and what we’ve built so far, we’re both designers, so being able to play and collaborate with different talented people has always been a dream for us, and now we’re able to do it.

 

🍰 Btw, can we ask what motivated you to collaborate with us?

🌸 What motivated us is your graphic identity, your colorful universe but also your designs. I have followed you almost since the beginning of Tarta Gelatina and quickly I bought a set of pillowcases. I loved every detail of the packaging. Our biggest wish with Re-leaf is to collaborate with artists. I talked to Jb about it and we figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. So we did. And we're happy we did.

 

🌸 From your side, what motivated you to accept this collaboration?

🍰 We’re so glad you enjoy our designs :) We’ve followed you on Instagram for many months and we love your shop’s curation, basically, you sell all the fun little things that we’d love to have in our home. So, deciding to work with you was very easy, once checked the about page on your website we thought ‘we like these people, we should do something with them :)”

 

🍰 How would you describe the aesthetics inspiration for this collaboration?

🌸 We are quite fans of the counterculture of the ’60s. Whether it’s the psychedelic movement or the hippie one. I always said I was born at the wrong time. As soon as we decided what object we wanted to create, we naturally looked for inspiration in those two movements. This could be translated into a colorful, wavy aesthetic, something slow, smooth but powerful.

 

🌸 Based on our inspirations, how did you create the design? What was the process?

🍰 Well, to be honest, from the moment you described the vibe that you were looking for and showed us a couple of ideas, we instantly knew what you were looking for, and some ideas quickly came to mind. From there, it was just playing around until we had something that we were proud of enough to share with you and the world :)

 

🍰 What is the perfect place to have one of these cushions?

🌸 Everywhere haha! In the living room, the bedroom, basically everywhere you have a seat or bed. Even on the floor :-)

 

🍰 How should we name this cushion? ;)

🌸 What a wonderful question! 

Dizzy daisy

Dazzling daisy

...

🍰 Dizzy Daisy sounds perfect, love it, case closed :) next topic...

 

🍰 What are your current challenges, and what are you doing to overcome them?

🌸 We are super proud of our little business but we would like to be more visible to continue this adventure. Some businesses work very well from the beginning, like yours, but this is not necessarily the case for everyone. Nobody talks enough about the difficulties of e-commerce. We are more than motivated but we need customers :-)

To overcome this problem of visibility, I am currently taking a training course on Facebook advertising. Unfortunately, if visibility doesn't come organically (which is rare nowadays), you have to turn to paid advertising. And that's what we're going to do. Before I started the training, I really thought that it was wrong to pay to be visible and make sales (let's not lie, that's the goal here). Not at all! The social networks of Facebook are set up so that we have no choice. It's the norm today for companies, small or big, to pay for ads to make sales. 

So the next step will be to schedule ads on Facebook and see the results. It's not the jackpot right away. You have to try different things and analyze the numbers to find the perfect combination for your business. It's a long process.

 

🌸 Have you ever done paid advertising?

🍰 We’ve run social media ads for clients in the past, so we totally understand what you mean. And we’re pretty sure that it will work for you with such nice videos and photos you’re doing lately. If you ever need any advice on this matter, please let us know!

With TARTA GELATINA, we've never invested in advertising because we’re lucky to have built a community before with HOMEDREAMING, which is where we got most of our first clients from.

 

🍰 What can we expect next from Re-leaf?

🌸 To still be here in a year, to grow, to improve. What we would really like is to develop collaborations with designers/makers. In the future, why not start designing our own products.

 

🌸 What’s next for Tarta Gelatina?

🍰 Sounds like a nice plan, we haven’t seen many shops doing this kind of collaboration so you may have a nice opportunity there to experiment.

From our side, we currently have many ongoing projects and a couple of collaborations with amazing artists are coming too, although everything is in the prototyping stage so we don’t want to reveal much yet ;) all we can say is that we’re expanding our product categories.

 

🌸 That sounds great! 

Thanks for the chat. It was so nice!

🍰 Thanks to you for trusting us for this project :) Hope we can do more things together in the future!

 

Shop our Dizzy Daisy cushion covers

Go visit their website, they have fabulous products Tarta Gelatina