Welcome to The Gaia Collection, our business has just been registered and we are now an official Young Enterprise Scheme company and a registered business. We started this business because we want to help preserve New Zealand's amazing wildlife. Already we've decided to work with the company Abstract Designs, in Petone and have our first design ideas. We have also reached out to Forest and Bird NZ and have figured out the best way for us to spread awareness about some of New Zealand's wildlife.
So why The Gaia Collection? Out of all our business ideas, why did we choose to go with The Gaia Collection? When we were first brainstorming we knew that we wanted to do something to help New Zealanders, and our native flora and fauna was definitely part of the New Zealander we wanted to help.
So we started to look into some of our wildlife, what needed helping and what isn't being helped. After not too long we can across a very long list of endangered and critically endangered plants and animals and we were shocked by the small populations and how many we hadn't heard of. This started our idea of spreading awareness. So we moved on to how we were going to spread awareness and our minds instantly turned to jewellery. At first, we actually were leading towards enamel pins, however, we thought a cool twist could be to make them out of wood to showcase that natural look as well as being eco-friendly.
We then reached out to Abstract Designs, the company we've decided to produce our jewellery range through, and went into their workshop in Petone. The companies run by husband and wife and we were fortunate enough to be able to talk to one of the owners Chris Baxter, who loved our ideas and is super passionate about what he does. He showed us around his workshop and proposed some different jewellery ideas. That's how we came to the idea of earrings.
So with a producer of our product found we turned to find the plants and animals we wanted to spread awareness about. Our CFO, Eli started to research further into all the different endangered wildlife and after connecting with Forest and Bird we decided to first spread awareness on 1 plant and 2 birds species (stay tuned as you'll be hearing more about them shortly).
Meanwhile our CEO, Olivia has been busy in our school's tech room learning how to use Abode Illustrator to create our earring designs, within a couple of weeks we had our first designs. After a bit more practice and she was able to create our logo. Now only yesterday we had our designs finalised and cut into wood for the first time.
Things are definitely starting to pick up the pace here at The Gaia Collection and it shouldn't be too long before we're sharing our product with the world.
