Have you ever been to Hawaii? Try as I might to persuade our General Manager to book tickets to Hawaii as a reference and research experience, it just didn’t fly. 🙂
Instead of heading there physically, let’s take a virtual trip to this beautiful island getaway and learn about our friends of Ink & Arrow Fabrics and their shop,
Terri, the owner of Kuni Island Fabrics, was in contact with us earlier this year. After working at ‘Kuni Dry Goods’ as a buyer for many years, the shop closed 20 years ago. Terri opened her own store on the property and kept the ‘Kuni’ part as the business was established for almost 50 years! Many of the employees from Kuni Dry Goods remained and have been there ever since.
We were excited to hear from Terri when she reached out looking for sponsors for their upcoming contest. Kuni Island Fabrics has a contest at their store once a year. They choose fabric, set the rules and inspire their customers to participate! This year, as a way to encourage shopping local, to contribute to collections for the Food bank and to provide some variety into their daily businesses, Terri reached out to other stores in the area. The Calico Cat, Kaimuki Dry Goods and Hidden Yardage also participated in this contest. In fact, Carol at Calico Cat had just been shown the I&A collections by our Sales Manager Jesus, and everyone agreed to feature the main print from City Life as the contest feature! We were thrilled and proudly donated the main prize. This, along with contributions from other vendors and the stores provided three gift certificates and Terri created Prize baskets. We loved the contest idea so much, we wanted to also give a fat quarter and pen to every participant as a thank you for supporting the stores and our fabrics!
The challenge: Use the City Life Rooftop Gardens print and create original projects in the following categories: Tote Bag, Quilt and Gift. Another fun requirement was the project had to include an arrow, as a nod to Ink & Arrow. How fun!?!? I must say, every time we got project pictures from Terri it was like Christmas morning!!!!
Here are some of the entries…. Ahhhmayyyzing!!!
We will be adding these beautiful projects to the Your Ink & Arrow section of our website in the coming weeks. Feel free to send us an email at info@inkandarrowfabrics if you were one of the participants and want to include your name with the project on the ‘Your Ink & Arrow’ part of our website… you’ll be famous!!!
Patti (one of our Sales Managers) and Nui Mona (shop owner) were tasked with picking the winners! They definitely had their work cut out for them – wowza! Here are the winners – so exciting!!!
GRAND PRIZE WINNER: BROOKE WITSBERGER
QUILT CATEGORY WINNERS:
TOTE BAG CATEGORY WINNERS:
GIFT CATEGORY WINNERS:
I am INSPIRED! I’m sure you are too. Big round of applause to all the participants, we are truly impressed and cannot wait to see what else people make with Ink & Arrow!
What a wonderful way to engage the customers and it just happened that Terri said it helped bring in a new group of customers and their families. It helped to build her business, not to mention the entries made a stunning store display!
We are so thankful for the shops we work with, we hope you enjoyed learning a little more about Kuni Island Fabrics and look forward to sharing more stories from the industry!
On the QT 