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A small, online business operating from the Old Mill, outside Newcastle West, has caught the eye of parenting magazine, Junior. Now, pixi + jon co. has been shortlisted for a design award, with the winners to be announced shortly.
For company owner, Anne O’Connell, the shortlisting has been a boost for the home-based company she set up some years ago.
At the time, she was looking for a change from her very demanding job as a nurse in the Emergency Department at UHL. But even more so, she explains she was hoping to harness her creative streak, do something in the arts and crafts line.
She had, she says, inherited her interest in crafts from her Athea grandmother Pixie Liston who could turn her hand to every kind of needle work, from embroidery to crochet and knitting and who designed and made all the family’s clothes. Her happy memories of days spent with Pixie and with her grandfather are remembered now in her website – pixiandjonco.com.
Designing and making leather bows in different colours on clips and headbands for little girls was Anne’s first step into her bold, new freelance world and turned out to be a winner.
Other unusual designs followed including leather party hats with pom-poms and leather bunting. “I spotted there was a lot of waste with paper hats and bunting,” Anne explains.
But her leather versions can be used again and again, and have proved very popular and indeed have won her the nomination in the Junior Awards Dress Up Party category.
All of the products are made in small quantities by a leather artisan and her husband Gerard.
Little ‘mini’ bags, again in leather, added another line but to her great surprise, Anne found herself getting calls from adult women asking, will a phone fit? She then had to develop a slightly larger or midi version for adult women and are personalised to taste.
To her even greater surprise and satisfaction, Covid-19 and lockdown have turned out to be good for business as more and more people turned to online shopping. And she is hoping a win
Anne is married to Gerard Brassil, and they live with their two girls at Old Mill.
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