Houseof x Mustard Made.
This month we caught up with Jess, the Co-Founder of Mustard Made, to chat all things lockers, colour palettes and the highs and lows of running a business.
This month we interviewed Jess, the Co-Founder of Mustard Made, along with her sister Becca. Their seriously cool Locker brand has a similar love of colour to us! Check out the images below from a recently collaborated photoshoot and their gorgeous website at mustardmade.co.uk.
We are so excited to have you feature on our blog, tell us a little bit about yourself and your brand.
Hi, I’m Jess from London and I run Mustard with my sister Becca who lives in sunny Australia. I spent 10 years working my way up the career ladder in fashion buying before leaving it all behind in 2018 to follow the slightly crazy idea of selling lockers to the world!
Having our own business has given us both more challenges, more adventure, definitely more sleepless nights but best of all it’s given us more time together.
What has been your biggest hurdle so far in creating Mustard?
There’s always a lot that goes on behind the scenes and plenty of tears! It’s pretty boring but shipping has been one of the biggest obstacles for us to get our products out there. We sell big, heavy furniture and we’re a small company, so it’s taken a lot of work and research to get competitive rates for our customers.
Over the last month we also launched two new products and added two additional colours to our range. This came with a lot of financial pressure as we stretched the cash flow to the limit. We went from buying one container per country to buying multiples in a short space of time and all this comes with risk and expense. It’s been a little hairy at times, but we are settling in on the other side of what we called ‘the leap’.
Tell us what your biggest achievement has been since creating mustard.
It’s hard to pick one so I’m going to say two! When we first launched at a trade show in Australia the reaction was so overwhelming. People kept saying the nicest things to us and placing orders! We honestly could not believe it and we smashed our four-day target on the first day. After a full year of work to get to that point it felt incredible to have our belief in our products validated like that.
Secondly, seeing our lockers out in the real world. It still feels surreal to see photos of them in homes or to walk into a beautiful shop and see them. I hope that feeling never fades!
We love how honest and open you are on your blog about your journey with Mustard, why do you think it is important to share your story?
Thank you, it’s often daunting to be open so I’m glad you appreciate it! It can feel lonely running a small business and it truly brings us comfort to hear other people talk about their journey, to know we aren’t the only ones! It’s genuinely not all pretty and certainly not all smooth sailing so being honest about that helps us to feel connected to other people and hopefully offer some support back. Particularly as women in business we need to find support and ways to share our experiences. We also want people to know that behind the brand is two sisters, giving it everything we’ve got. When things go wrong, we feel every pain, when we get a lovely email, it really does make our day. There’s no point trying to act like we’re a big corporation, being small is our strength.
“...being small is our strength”
We love your use of colour, tell us the story behind this?
The colours have mostly been quite instinctive, picking up on trends like blush and olive and combining them with neutrals like white and slate. They’re a big product so picking colours that will sit well in real homes and last the test of time was important. It was a really fun process to map out the whole palette together and create the different combinations that all work so well together.
What is your favourite colour from your range?
Mine personally would be the blush, it’s been our biggest seller and it’s such a soft, dusty pink that’s really quite subtle! Though I do have a soft spot for Navy!
Lastly, what is on your product wish list from houseof?
The mesh table lamp in pink. The structure, the fact the cable colour matches, the way the bulb softly shines through. Love it!
