“I Built This With Every Version of Me”

Why Hello Chooki? (Or: How I Spent thousands of dollars to learn what I now know for free)

Let’s skip the polished origin story where a savvy entrepreneur spots a gap in the market and builds an empire with quiet confidence and a colour-coded spreadsheet.

That’s not what happened here. What happened here was a girl raised in the country, three little boys deep, married to a man who works away, deciding that starting a baby and children’s linen brand seemed like a totally reasonable idea. No strategy. No plan. Just vibes and a credit card.

This was not a reasonable idea. But it’s the reason Hello Chooki exists today, and honestly, it’s the reason you should trust us more — not less.

The Expensive Education Nobody Warns You About

Here’s the brutally honest version: I thought I could just… make a brand and start selling. Cute fabric, a logo, done. I had zero clue how saturated the baby linen market already was. I had never negotiated with a manufacturer in my life, so I paid whatever I was told to pay, ordered what I was told to order, and watched thousands of dollars disappear into stock that didn’t move. I didn’t understand social media beyond scrolling it at 11pm feeding a newborn. I had no research process, no product strategy, no marketing knowledge, nothing.

It was, by any objective measure, a mess.

But here’s the thing about a mess — you either drown in it or you learn to read it. I chose reading. Every dollar I burned taught me exactly how manufacturing pricing actually works, so now I negotiate like someone who’s been burned enough times to know better (because I have). Every post that got zero engagement taught me what actually stops a scrolling parent in their tracks. Every unsold unit taught me to research obsessively before committing to anything — the market, the fabric, the fit, the actual lived problem a product needs to solve, not the problem I assumed it solved from my armchair.

I now understand manufacturing the way I understand my own children’s meltdown triggers: intimately, and through hard-won experience I didn’t ask for but am deeply grateful to have.

Enter: Daycare, and the Reality Check I Didn’t See Coming

Then came daycare. My eldest’s first day. I thought I was prepared — I had the labelled sheets, the spare clothes, the whole checklist ticked off on paper. What I wasn’t prepared for was the actual feeling of walking out that door and handing my son over to strangers for the first time, hoping the tiny details I’d sorted at home would somehow translate to him feeling safe in a room I couldn’t see into.

That feeling doesn’t leave you. It also doesn’t show up in a linen brand’s product description. So I stopped trying to sell soft sheets to people who weren’t thinking about softness at all — they were thinking about whether their child would settle, whether the educators would notice the little things, whether any of this would make the transition even slightly easier on a heart that wasn’t ready to let go yet.

That’s when Hello Chooki stopped being a linens brand and became a daycare essentials brand. Not because it was a clever pivot. Because it was the truth of what parents actually needed someone to understand.

The Long Version of Who I Am

I grew up modest — parents who valued quality and comfort but never lost sight of what something was actually worth. Nothing was bought because it looked nice on a shelf; it was bought because it earned its place. That’s baked into how I build product now: does this actually work, is it actually worth the money, or does it just photograph well?

I also spent my childhood being told to sit still, which — if you’d met me — you’d know was hilarious advice. State-level swimmer, regional rower, cross country, athletics, the works, eventually an Australian champion rower. You don’t get there by being naturally gifted and lucky. You get there by showing up when it’s unglamorous, losing plenty, and refusing to let that be the end of the story. That’s the same energy that turned a failed linen brand into a business I’m actually proud of. I don’t quit when something doesn’t work. I find out why, and I fix it.

And these days, my training ground looks a little different — it’s a house with three small boys and a husband who’s away working for half the year, which makes me a solo parent more often than not. There is no version of that life that runs on guesswork or wishful thinking. You research, you plan, you adapt, and you get comfortable making decisions fast with imperfect information — which, funnily enough, is also an excellent skill set for running a small business built on trial, error, and a lot of very expensive lessons.

So Why Hello Chooki?

Because I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to feel like you’re the only one drowning in decisions when your child starts daycare. Because every product we make has been shaped by real research, real manufacturing knowledge, and real conversations with parents and educators about what actually matters in that room. Because I’m not selling you a fantasy of effortless parenting — I’m building the daycare essentials I wished existed on my own first daycare drop-off, made by someone who’s lived the exact overwhelm you’re feeling right now.

We’re not the obvious choice because we’re the flashiest or the loudest. We’re the obvious choice because we’ve done the expensive, humbling, occasionally humiliating work of actually understanding what you need — and we built the brand around that, not around what looked good in a pitch deck.

Welcome to Hello Chooki. We get it, because we’ve lived it.

Sophie x