Without a doubt, everything at Kate Jones’ atelier get.give on 14 Po Tuck Street in Sai Ying Pun is to swoon over. Her terrifically clean-lined space in grey and cream hues has a whole host of swishy decorative tricks that could make a stylist happily rearranging and playing for hours. Jones also runs creative consultancy At Liberty which offers boutique creative strategy services with a focus on events, marketing and styling. Some of her illustrious clients include Landmark Magazine, Ellermann Flower Boutique, Krug, FilmAid, Hermès, Fendi Casa, Colour Living, Clinique and Miele.
However if you’re hankering after a considered design-focused buy, you’re in luck. Read on to learn more about the smart thinking behind get.give.
How would you describe your atelier get. give?
I started get.give together with my business partner (and cousin) Seanne Ducat. We wanted to find a way to provide a broader and more thoughtful offering of gifting that can be enjoyed every day. We’ve invested a lot of time to carefully curate a selection of products made by passionate producers that we believe recipients will cherish, most of which we’ve picked up during our travels.
We currently have two arms to the business: one is the retail store which will also be launched online in early October this year (very exciting). The second is our Gifting Agency where we work with corporate clients to pair them with like-minded businesses and create gifting strategies and collections that truly align with their brand ethos.
Later in the year we’ll be adding a third arm to the business which is our own collection of eco-friendly gift wrapping that we’ve created together with local artists in Asia.
The get.give shop and studio is where customers can come and really explore our family of brands. Everything that we’ve selected has a personal connection with both myself and my business partner Seanne. The store is where we can first hand relay these stories to the clients and really educate them about the products. We will do this with our online store, but we’re both a little old school and love to meet with people face to face.
Why get.give?
We have been frustrated for a while now by the lack of gifting options in Hong Kong and generally worldwide. We both feel that what is on offer is very trendy, gimmicky, lacking heart and ultimately dust collectors that end up in a landfill. I haven’t been able to find one great store that offers a variety of useful products from quality makers that suits both men and women across a variety of ages. get.give is our answer to this. We’re still early days so the collection will grow with us and our customers as we develop more of a relationship.
From the corporate gifting side, we found that some brands are doing themselves more harm than good with the items they are choosing to gift. We’d see gifts with large logos in bins post-events or found that everyone would gift the same thing – one year it’s a speaker, the next it’s a phone charger. So recipients end up with three or more of an item stacking up.
All this leads to what Seanne and I term ‘gifting guilt’ – that feeling you have when you receive something and instantly feel bad about the amount of packaging or the fact that it’s just another thing to store away or awkwardly try to give away. Our aim is for get.give to make ‘gifting guilt’ to be a thing of the past.
A spotlight on some of the brands you are bringing to Hong Kong
We have exclusive artist edition rugs by New York based Artist August Krogan-Roley together with Kahoko. All hand woven in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
We also stock the most amazing hand-picked herbs from Greece by the brand Daphnis & Chloe. They also work with local farmers to help them get the most from their crops with organic farming techniques.
Los Poblanos is a family-run lavender farm and homestead in New Mexico introduced to me by great friends whilst on holiday this year. They make the most exquisite products from their lavender in the summer and chillies in the autumn … I ended up helping to harvest the lavender, learn about their processes and meet with the family. Now we have them in Hong Kong which is very exciting.
We are bringing in enamelware by Japanese brand Kaico and designed by Japanese design icon Makoto Koizumi and hand-made wooden household brushes and cleaning tools from Redecker, a 75-year-old family run business from Germany.
