About Us
How we got here
I started Cotton Clara in 2014 at my kitchen table with a sketchbook, a sewing box, and a nagging feeling that craft kits didn't have to look the way they looked. Everything out there felt either childish or intimidating — nothing felt like it belonged in the life I actually wanted to live. So I started designing my own.
The real trigger was maternity leave and a dawning realisation that I really didn't want to go back. I'd always craved freedom and felt confined in every job I'd ever had — so this had been a long time coming. I saw other women building businesses alongside their families on Instagram and thought: I can do that. Even though I didn't yet know what my "that" was.
I started slowly — a hand-drawn logo, an Etsy shop, constantly iterating. I'd probably made about £17.50 in profit when my father-in-law Neil believed in me enough to lend me the money to buy a laser cutter. It lived in our conservatory for two years while I built the business, worked full-time, and brought up two little boys. Twelve years later we're stocked in Liberty, shipping to forty countries, and helping hundreds of thousands of people discover that making something by hand is genuinely one of the best things you can do for yourself.
The Laser Cutter Years
The laser cutter arrived in 2017 with much stress, several ramps, and a lot of sweat. For a couple of years it lived in our conservatory while I worked out what this business could actually be. I hadn't yet landed on craft kits — I was making earrings, stitched signs, hanging banners, experimenting freely and learning fast. It was a bit all over the place, honestly. But I was selling on Etsy and Not on the High Street, walking my post to the post office every day, and loving every minute of it.
One of our most popular products was a rainbow hanging banner kit — a wooden board with holes and thread to stitch a rainbow. We still sell it now. In September 2019, it caught the eye of a buyer at Boots the Chemist. They were expanding their Christmas gifting range and working with small businesses, and the order they subsequently placed for Christmas 2020 was unlike anything we'd seen before. Note the date. Because just as that order landed, the world started to shut down.
Boots order in hand, we moved out of the house and into our first proper studio — a freezing cold maze of rooms in an old Victorian dyeworks in Loughborough. We thought we were getting space to breathe. We had no idea we were about to really need it.
