Welcome to Rebecca Angela! I’m so excited you are here. I’m thrilled to be launching Rebecca Angela. In a lot of ways, it has been 50 years in the making so to finally be here is wonderful.
Rebecca Who?
I’m Rebecca – and yes, my middle name is Angela! I’ve written about me over on my About page so I won’t go over that again now. What I do want to share in this post is how Rebecca Angela, the brand, came into being.
I’ve been in creative business for more than five years now. My former brand is called Blue Radish. I loved creating for and working in my Blue Radish business – until I didn’t. Creating is what I love to do and when I started Blue Radish, it was a dream come true. I embarked on a HUGE learning curve to learn all I know now about small business. I learnt by doing – doing just about everything for the business myself. It was challenging but it was exciting and, most of the time, fun. I love learning. I love finding solutions to problems and figuring stuff out. I’m proud of what I achieved with Blue Radish. I created, I believe, a beautiful, high-quality product with a very strong brand aesthetic. Gorgeous customers and supporters joined me and I discovered a wonderful community of other creatives which I had never before tapped into. I thank each and every one of you. I hope I was able to give back as much as I received.
Goodbye Blue Radish…
And then there came a time when I didn’t love it so much. It is a complicated story that I will share one day but not in this post. In short, though, a build-up of stress (mostly outside the business) led to a period of poor mental and physical health that brought about a complete re-evaluation of my life. Eventually, after much soul-searching and dealing with thoughts of failure and not wanting to let go of something I had worked so hard to build, I decided that it was time to wind up Blue Radish.
…Or Is It?
BUT, I didn’t. Not completely. I stopped creating and making for Blue Radish. I took down my web-stores and handed all my stock over to a bricks-and-mortar store to sell on consignment. But my date for closing the business kept getting pushed out and pushed out. In the end, I had to really look at why that was.
When I really dig deep, I recognise that my nature is to be creative. There is an artist within me that I haven’t given full voice. I have only let her dance around the edges of my life. Even when working on Blue Radish full time, art was just a small part. I think my artist was frustrated with that. I think that frustration was a big part of my decision to wind up Blue Radish.
But that artist within me would not let Blue Radish go. She was holding on to the only place she had, until now, been allowed to speak up.
She and I have been getting to know each other recently. We’ve been having quite a few heart-to-hearts actually. She told me how she is itching to get out. She wants freedom of expression. To play. To dabble with all kinds of media. She wants to do ALL – THE – THINGS. Most of all, she wants to put beautiful things out into the world.
And she told me her name.
Her name is Rebecca Angela.
Of course! That made so much sense. It just clicked. Blue Radish needed to evolve and it is evolving into Rebecca Angela.
Hello Rebecca Angela
Blue Radish can finally be put to rest and, under the brand Rebecca Angela, I will bring my artist’s work to the world. At the moment that will take the form of art downloads and print-on-demand products such as framed prints. I’ll be letting Rebecca Angela go where she wants to go but I can see her beloved fabric design in the future and hopefully much more too.
Expect to hear more from her too about the fight to be heard, the struggle to find her voice and encouragement from her to find your own creative path because she believes, as I do, that everyone is creative.
To give her a fresh start, so that she does not feel constrained by the Blue Radish brand, I have created this new website for her and new social media accounts for her. I’d love for you to follow her on Facebook, Instagram and/or Twitter. I can’t wait to share this evolution with you!
