Yin and Yang: How do you balance work and family?
A wonderful and at the same time challenging part of our business is that we do it as a family. We have a whole circuit of music festival around Australia which we attend annually. When we are heading off to a big event, it’s pretty epic and takes a lot of team work between us as a couple and often involves help from our family for childcare. There is a huge amount of preparation involved in sorting the stock, packing the van, heading off in the caravan, and coping with travelling an average 1000 kms with two very active little boys. We then arrive, take a whole day or more to set up, trade for about 16 hours or more a day on average for five days straight, going to bed in the early hours and waking up at unearthly toddler hours. We then pack the stall and travel back home, exhausted to say the least.
The balance of work and family comes from living in a very peaceful place, the Blue Mountains National Park, surrounded by nature and really soaking that up when we arrive home. We take important time to slow down in our beautiful garden, to enjoy family time in our spa, we avoid driving far and we try to do as little as possible to counteract the very stimulating festival environments.
We delve into our creative pursuits and spiritual journeys again and generally commit to very little until we have regained our energy.
Disclaimer: It also helps greatly that we have established a second life in Italy, where we have been taking three months off the business per year to go and completely relax! We love taking time to slow down there, live a local life in a quiet village, make new friends and let our creative juices flow again in preparation for another busy round of Australian festivals from spring through to autumn each year.
The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
Parenting and doing this business has not been easy. It was a very physically demanding job for two of us to run for ten years before having children. During both pregnancies, breastfeeding years and still now, the physical help I can give with the heavy work has ceased. Meaning we have to give ourselves extra time for all the jobs that we used to do more quickly as a couple. Now my partner attacks those alone while I parent. We have also arranged a whole team of staff at festivals based in various states of Australia, to help in the stall or with the children. The biggest challenge has been trying to squeeze my admin side of the business into stolen kid-free moments. Over the last six years, we feel like we have had to develop a skill in telepathy in order to make up for the lack of time we get to talk about the important parts of the business. There always seems to be little people needing our attention and not letting us talk. I’m sure all the parents out there may understand what we mean!
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
We truly love the freedom that running our own business gives us. The perfect combination of taking the slower Australian winter months off and transplanting ourselves to the divine Italian summer is a dream that we have always had. We are even more happy that we can do it now with our children.
For two travellers like us, it truly floats our boats!
Even within Australia, despite the exhausting element of being on the road so much, we do love the feeling of heading off from normal life to drive across the country in different directions and enter the magical land of a festival, where the unexpected always happens, where creativity absolutely thrives and where we hang out with the most amazing humans that have become like family.
There are the difficult parts of running one’s own business. Feeling like there are always things on the “to do list”, festivals to apply for, new stock to arrange, stock to sort through, muddy marquees to clean, the caravan to unpack, another festival to prepare for…. but all in all, the benefits far outweigh the difficulties. The proof is in the pudding – we’re still doing it, two kids and two decades later!
Hopes and dreams: What next?
As our children grow and we inevitably grow older too, we dream about establishing a way to sell our shoes with less physically hard work in the future. This could look like having a thriving online business, where a magical elf manages my social media and all things that are not my forte!
We would also love to eventually have our shoes in a few beautiful shoe shops around the country that specialise in hand crafted shoes. We think we are ready to move in this direction and plan for the year ahead to open up these types of possibilities. We still love doing festivals for now, as they fill our soul cup in so many other ways, but we like the idea of growing older with more passive streams of income. We trust that this is possible after all of these years of hard work on the road getting our product out there in real life to thousands of festival goers over the last two decades. This is our future vision for our business.
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