Handmade success

When Shauna Neill arrived for our lunchtime interview on a slightly overcast morning, I was down to the last crumbs of my panini. Shauna sat down, announced she was also starving and ordered a lamb pie with a dreamy smile. Within those first five minutes I decided Shauna Neill is a gogetter, a woman who knows what she wants and has no qualms striving for it.

Shauna’s earrings – a unique design of bright telephone wire, can you believe it – are one of the reasons I wanted to meet her. She owns Blossom Handmade, an accessory range she started as a home industry that has blossomed, excuse the pun, into an international business. The Mount Edgecombe mother of three has a background in marketing and brand management and was in the corporate world when she began to yearn for a creative outlet. “I had just had my second son and I felt the urge to let this side of me breathe. I have always loved fashion and grew up in a family that loved design and creativity.” She attended a jewellery workshop, a random decision on her
part. “I made a few things for myself and every time I wore them, I would be asked where I got them from.”

Around the time her third son was born, Shauna had an epiphany. “I looked at telephone wire and I saw something that was raw, natural and proudly South African. It has such a contemporary, wearable African feel. I started playing around with it, realising the possibilities were endless. I could do anything – there are 140 colours to design with!”
Earrings, bracelets and necklaces made up the new range, which Shauna called ‘Ring Ring Bling’. “I love that name,” she says. “Ring ring of the telephone and bling for the jewellery.” She called her new business ‘Blossom Handmade’, after a nickname her mother had for her. “She called me Blossie!”

Blossom Handmade started slowly, with a pop up shop at a KZN Fashion Council event, where Shauna was introduced to the department of trade and industry. She was selected to go a trade fair in Berlin soon after. Blossom Handmade was soon being distributed to Namibia, Abu Dabhi, Australia, Berlin and Réunion Island. She is off to Africa Fashion Week in London in August. Shauna now employs three previously unemployed ladies, who
make the jewellery at her Mount Edgecombe studio. Her unique cotton t-shirt necklaces are made at LIV Village in Cottonlands.

“I think I was quite fortunate to have a background in business and a flair for design. This made me fearless
when I started Blossom Handmade. I believed, and still do, that nothing is insurmountable. I had an idea and I
ran with it, and I’ve been blessed to see it grow steadily,” Shauna smiles again. “Honestly, though, it’s surreal.
I’m loving the colours, the styles and the fun I can have with jewellery. And seeing someone wearing my jewellery is an unbeatable feeling.”

Shauna says discovering her passion later on in life is a thing of beauty, not a disadvantage. “My goal was always to work from home, so I could be with my children. I created my dream and I think to be living it at this age is such a lovely thing. There is a peace you experience when you know you are where you are meant to be.”