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.
When everything happened at once
2020 was, to put it mildly, a lot. The Boots order and Covid arrived at the same time, and suddenly we went from a small studio operation to something that felt completely different almost overnight. Craft had its moment - people were at home, they wanted something to do with their hands, and our kits were exactly what they were looking for. We hired a whole team, and we needed every one of them - because at that point we weren't just assembling kits, we were making everything from scratch. Every wooden board that went into every kit was laser cut right there in the studio. It was chaotic, it was exhausting, and it was one of the most formative periods Cotton Clara has ever been through.
The years that followed were a blur of growth, lessons, and slowly working out what we actually wanted to be. We stripped things back, focused down, and landed on what Cotton Clara is really about - design-led, beautiful craft kits that are genuinely accessible for beginners but loved by everyone. Not everything survived that edit. Most of our laser cut wooden products were retired as we focused on the kits that truly represented us. The rainbow banner board is still with us though - we couldn't quite bring ourselves to let that one go.
In 2021 we moved into our current studio - and for the first time, the space actually matched the ambition.
Design is everything - and I'm proud of that
I have always loved product. Shopping, discovering things, the magic of walking into a beautifully merchandised space and finding something that stops you in your tracks - it's genuinely one of my favourite things. And I've never been able to look at anything without thinking: how could this be better?
That instinct is at the heart of everything Cotton Clara makes. I look at the craft industry and I see too much of it built around cheap, mass-produced product that nobody really loves - bought on impulse, used once, thrown away. I've seen it as a customer buying craft kits for my own kids, watching beautiful ideas let down by flimsy materials and forgettable packaging. It frustrated me enough to do something about it.
My influences are probably not what you'd expect from a craft brand. I'm obsessed with Scandinavian design - simple, considered, bold with colour. And Japanese design too - pared back, heritage-led, nothing wasted. Both traditions share something I care deeply about: that the everyday things in your life should be beautiful. Not expensive. Just beautiful.
That's what I'm trying to do with Cotton Clara. Take traditional crafts that have been around for centuries, bring a modern design eye to them, make them sustainable and desirable, and put them in the hands of people who never thought of themselves as makers. Because everyone deserves to make something they're genuinely proud of.
We're just getting started
The ambition has never really been about scale for its own sake. It's simpler than that - we want to get as many people making things as possible. People who've always assumed craft wasn't for them because everything they'd seen was too complicated, too fussy, or just not their kind of thing. We want to be the brand that changes their mind.
The bigger vision is something I think about a lot. Imagine a world where picking up a craft kit is as automatic as picking up your phone. Where you pack something to make without even thinking about it - in your bag for a long journey, on the table for a quiet evening, on holiday instead of another box set. That's the cultural shift we're working towards, and we genuinely believe it's possible. Crafting used to be normal. We want to make it normal again.
We have more product ideas than we'll ever have time to make - things we know will bring real joy to people's lives, things that don't exist yet in the way we want to make them. Every kit we design starts with the same question: will someone love this enough to show it to someone else? Will they finish it and feel something? If the answer is yes, we make it. If it's not quite there yet, we keep going until it is.
The best of Cotton Clara is still ahead of us. We can't wait to show you what's coming.