30/01/2026
These two beautiful souls have been the ones to support Rocco and stock his beaded creations at their store ❤️🥰
👋 Intro Post 👋
Wow - we have quite a few new followers after my post about School Can’t yesterday - so thought I might do a new intro post for our new followers.
We are Rachael (mum) and April (15) and 3 months ago we opened our first shop, Dragon Nest ❤️ in Belgrave. And when I say ‘we’ opened, I do mean WE. We are very much partners, and although I do the socials (April is too young!), we both worked equally as hard setting up the shop, and now running it (expect when April is off being a teenager, which I love).
Dragon Nest is a collective of about 50 makers - all genuine handmade or artist designed products 🪡
So how did we get here?
April was born creative, and an entrepreneur. When she was 6, she started asking me for a stall out the front of our house. Our house was drowning in origami at the time, so I suggested she make it an origami stall.
I showed her how to make a flier in Illustrator and we delivered it to our neighbours, and I let our friends know on Facebook. The stall was such a beautiful morning, with friends and neighbours stopping by. As soon as it was over, April asked when we could do it again! From there she did markets, sold her products in shops, built a website, exhibited her origami and taught workshops and we built her socials (Folded by Me).
At the same time, April always found going to school hard. We put in place all the supports we could. We changed schools. We made her go but the emotional toll was huge.
Lucky for April, there was a worldwide pandemic and lockdowns when she was 9, so we didn’t go back and it was the BEST decision ever 🥰
Over the last few years we joined 10 different collectives, and worked in one for over a year. We NEARLY bought the one we worked in, but it didn’t work out. But we had gone so far down the path of what we would do if we had our own shop, that we ended up starting our own!
So - here we are in our tiny shop in the Belgrave Arcade and couldn’t be happier 🤗 The community has been amazing. We are able to support other young makers, and local artists with aligned ethics of sustainability, community and valuing genuine handmade. Our workshops by us and our stallholders are all selling out and we have more and more people finding us, telling us that our shop is beautiful, they will tell their friends and they will be back for gifts.
Thanks for joining our journey ❤️
(Pic from a couple of years back at a homeschool camp where we bought these very cool First Nations artists hats that we are hoping to stock in our own shop now…)
