Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - July/August 2020

92 mental health development and inspired positivity. After about 10 million iterations on PowerPoint my friend helped with the graphics and the first edition was born! Tell us a bit about why you wanted to focus on a product for children’s mental wellbeing? The short answer is, I would like my children, well, all children, to experience the benefits of a positive mindset, resilience built in and the ability to feel able to handle life’s challenges when they are adults. In my opinion, mindfulness, positive thinking, and the ability to celebrate the small daily joys are the fundamental skills that could benefit us all in creating a happier life. In my day job I noticed how many adults were suffering due to anxiety and fear of change. I had also started studying mindfulness and realised it would be a great tool for my children. What if our children could have a positive and resilience tool kit built in from a young age? Would this mean they could perhaps grow up to be more balanced adults and would find some of life’s challenges easier to deal with? When I first started looking into the links between mindfulness, mindset, and positivity I was fascinated to learn how extremely beneficial they are for our mental health. My Happy Journal uses subtle ways of encouraging positive thinking, creativity, resilience and graduate, which encourages good mental health in children rather than being a how to or textbook on the subject. Where does the name come from? My daughter chose it! During one of the early drafts when my children were my toughest reviewers, my daughter said very matter of fact, “This is my happy diary, not yours. It has my thoughts, my drawings, my facts!” We changed diary to journal as we felt its different from a typical diary as its not dated so there is no pressure to fill it in every day. What products and gift lines do you offer? We currently have My Happy Journal (yellow edition), The Special edition (designed for stay at home ideas), pencils, art prints, and cards. I am working on a few more every exciting things, which hopefully will be ready early next year. What challenges did you overcome as a new company? Every day I realise how little I know about business and manufacture and at least 15 other things that I never consider until they happened. I am not sure I can say I have ever overcome a challenge as such, as pretty much everything is new and therefore one could, I suppose say they are challenges. I guess paper and quality was one of my biggest issues. The pages of My Happy Journal are 180 gms thick, which is about 2-3 times as thick as standard paper, and everyone told me I was mad to produce a children’s journal with pages that thick as it wasn’t cost effective. I don’t want a throw away product with pages that can only handle a soft pencil, I wanted to ensure our journals are robust and will last. The covers are wipe clean so sticky jammy