When was the last time you celebrated yourself? Inside of you is abundance just longing to be accessed and there is no better time than now to tap into that power. So give yourself credit and rejoice in your purpose by answering these questions about how you lift the world!
One of the biggest trends that Consuela is loving this season is the array of denim options that have hit the fashion scene. Your options are no longer limited to dark or light wash, distressed, or over-dyed. You can find denim all over the market in a variety of colors, patterns, shapes and styles.
Choosing a daring pair of denim over your everyday skinny jeans can take your whole outfit to an entirely new level and allows you to really show your personality through your wardrobe. How can you not stand out in a neon pink pair of skinnies or show your feminine flair with floral?
One reservation many people tend to have about jumping onto the daring denim trend bandwagon is they don’t know how to style them… but in reality, the options are endless! Let us assure you, this look truly is for everyone. Need some ideas?
Whimsical Pop.
Want to keep it simple and chic? Pair a neutral top with a fun pair of skinnies to sprinkle a dash of the unexpected. Glam it up with some accessories and you’re sophisticated and trendy. This look is absolutely versatile and is perfect for the self-proclaimed “Neutral Nellie”— get your casual look for a Sunday afternoon spent wandering South Congress in Austin and then trade out those flats for a pair of killer nude heels for an evening dinner party with friends.
Color Blocking.
Color blocking is an easy way to take a basic outfit and turn it up a notch! Mixing and matching bright bold colors is one of the hottest trends this season. Incorporating your colorful denim can be a fun challenge…just remember to follow 3 simple rules: stick to 2-3 colors, keep your items solid in pattern, and don’t be afraid to experiment with colors and contrast.
Pattern Play.
Want to be REALLY daring? Play with pattern! Who knew stripes and florals could complement each other? Mix and match the items you already have in your closet and your options are endless. The wild combinations you come up with add a touch of playfulness to your everyday outfit.
Check out our Pinterest Board for more inspiration! Enjoy being daring with you denim.
The Consuela blog highlights our core and directing mission and as such, we look forward to groovin’ with you through four unique sections that depict our foundational values:
Let us start by saying that we aren’t going to be the folks who try to contain or define beauty. We don’t want beauty to feel exclusionary. On the contrary,
Consuela rejoices in the inclusion of vast,
wonderful, and unique people.
Being fashionable to us is about having the chance to express your inside on the outer layers of your life. Perhaps one day that is embracing yourself with the remarkable warmth and comfort of an oversized soft knit sweater, or the vulnerability and clean feeling of a face with no makeup. On another day you could find yourself accentuated with liquid eyeliner and multi-colored wedges, or colored skinny jeans, or a flowing floral skirt, or an extra large vintage leather bag and mega-accessories. The variations of expression are endlessly inspired! The fun of this all is that we are real people who don’t live in a “beauty bubble” and we won’t pretend to. We’ll certainly show you how we like to rock style, color, texture and lifestyle in how we show up in the world. And…we hope it goes without saying that we’ll have a blast giving you ways to color your experiences with Consuela products to give serious glow to your lives.
One covenant we have in our Consuela culture is celebration.
You know when you get a deep breath of peace and realize it’s all going to be OK…if even just for a brief moment?
We are committed to creating this for one another. Let’s face it; we all need this as often as possible!
We are accessible and kind and adore a good ol’ sense of humor…and we want you to know us this way. We’ll give you glimpses into our own Consuela Universe—highlighting what we dig about music, art, dining, travel and what the “happs” are around the office (like unpacking 500+ boxes of totes, coffee talk in our living room, etc.). Of course, we’ll highlight how we jazz our own lives up with our slight addiction to Consuela products and all the good stuff (and road bumps) of developing a company culture that covets laughter framing an insatiable love for “Be-ing Consuela.”
We hope you’ll want to participate in growing the Consuela Culture Club with us…our very own “goodness revolution.” What is that, you ask? Pure bliss —an egoless social network for women where you can celebrate the art of YOU. What’s required of you? Participate as you are with a sense of humor. We look forward to providing the framework of many occasions to create spaces and places for mutual lift-off. The opportunities will be both big and small for diverse women to engage in all sorts of activities from small group topic discussions to larger than life parties. Your ticket into the club? Be YOU. We are sure about one thing: when we celebrate life, we lift the world.
Another value that tops our company list:
practice and participate in giving and getting love
that inspires, lifts and heals the world.
Truly, what else matters? We want this for the collective “Us,”… and in our very best form on our best day, we all want this. In this part of our blogosphere, we are committed to giving you our golden nuggets of delight to remember the remarkable person you are. Maybe these musings will catch you on top of your own wave and give you a rad ride throughout your day—or our reflections may lift you from the valley where you are feeling alone. In short, we want you to know that we are all moving through this together—and the fabric of support is both present and large for each of us.
There’s a reason the bag tag on our newest totes declares the following:
We are a spectrum of amazement. We love the Walt Whitman quote: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. We celebrate our prerogative to change and reinvent all throughout our lives.
We can’t wait to highlight the reflections of our very own Founder and favy designer, Conni Reed. She is our “Consuela,” the comforter, the visionary, the woman who encourages us all to dwell in possibility and support each other in these actions. She too is as multi-talented as we all are: business woman, friend, sister, aunt, fashionista, creative artist, wine lover, life seeker…you’ll get to see it and feel it and we know you’ll find yourself in there.
To our journey together—
Viva Consuela!
We adore this Walt Whitman quote– and there’s a reason the bag tag on our Couture tote declares the following: Celebrate you. Multi-faceted. Festive. Saturated. Fun. Curious. Feminine. Confident. Vivid. Textured. Hued. Unique. Inspired. The Consuela woman is every woman, everywhere, dynamic and vibrant in her heart and her life. We are a spectrum of amazement and celebrate our prerogative to change and reinvent all throughout our lives. So shine on in all your multitudes!
Consuela was fashioned in that magical moment of possibility. Reflecting on the beaches of a Cozumel vacation, potentiality splashed in sun reflected waves lapping through toes warming in the soft sand. A deep sigh of relief exhaling dreams of living with freedom and peace—released back into the great body of water—and the idea for Consuela was born.
We all know and get these miraculous moments that unfold in our lives. Frequent or not, they sweep us off of our feet to deliver us reprieve and to remind us that we are interconnected and alive to birth an amazing story. What do your moments look like? Maybe noticing the first electric lime green bud barely peeking out from a bare winter tree branch…or a song that carries the exact right words or notes to bring alive what you are feeling…a meal that bursts with flavorful intonations that make your heart savor happiness…a baby’s flawless skin and smile…laying in your pajamas on a Saturday morning with no agenda…whatever your magical moments look like—we honor them.
Consuela thrives on these magical moments. In fact, we even coined our active phrase…
…to remember that this life is indeed a verb, not a static noun. We are in the action of unfolding what is possible in our lives. More or less, we want Consuela to be more than just our “company”—for us it is the larger “Us”—a movement, a vibe, a synergy of living and loving connected by care and inspiration. Through it, we’ll experience the highs and lows and in betweens together…with the goal of living a positive and joyful life. Authenticity is what you can expect from our blogosphere.
Our greatest desire is to create a space where you can be embraced EXACTLY where you are—knowing that you deserve to dream for yourself new possibilities.
We’re hoping you decide to voyage along with us. Next week we will be giving you the goods on how we want to unfurl this fun, with the caveat that this dream is unfolding with “Us” in a dynamic conversation, so we know it will take on a life of its own as we move through the living layers together.
As we say, Viva Consuela! (Live in Possibility)
Coachella 2012 is in full swing! Even though we can’t be directly dancing the day away to the incredible live music, one thing we are stoked about is following the Coachella fashion world that will be lighting up the web over the next week. We consider Coachella the perfect marriage of music and fashion. Here at the Consuela headquarters, we are swooning over the free-spirited boho style that is in dazzling abundance at the festival—and we can’t get enough of florals and lace this season!
Are you one of the lucky ones enjoying Coachella? Do us a favor and rock the music and enjoy the fashion frenzy…
On March 5th, we had our first ever Consuela Culture Club event. Many more to follow! Watch Facebook and the blog for future info and invites!
We launched with a warm and conversational evening of wine and food at Botticelli’s in Austin, followed by soulful music at the opening act of Austin women front-led band The Whiskey Sisters performing at the Continental Club. Joy was the theme of the evening and in that spirit, about 20 women came to celebrate the fun.
The other day, one of the Consuela team members shared her reading from A Daily Dose of Sanity by Alan Cohen. In the daily vignette- Cohen, a Hawaii resident, spoke about calling himself the “Magnetic Man of Maui” in one of his keynotes. Afterwards, a young girl came up to him and pressed a coin against his arm. The coin fell to the ground and the little girl exclaimed with surprise and discontent, “I thought you said you were magnetic!”
He goes on to write in this story: “I laughed, but then I realized the child was serious. She really thought I was magnetic. With that came a striking realization: an innocent mind is open to all possibilities!” He goes on to comment that our problem is not that we know too little, sometimes our problem is that we think we know too much about why things will not or should not work. Not to say that knowledge and understanding is a bad thing at all…but to be aware so that we don’t stifle our awareness of how good things can and do work. Imagine—if we can be more magnetic about our desire for good things—they might just stick!
Around the office, we like to Viva Consuela and dwell in possibility. During lunch one day we began chatting about the question “what do you think it would take to make you happy?” The fulfilling career, a big bank account, or the perfect mate? What if it didn’t take anything to make you happy? What if you could experience happiness from the inside out—no matter what’s going on in your life? One of the Consuela ladies shared her experience reading celebrated transformational leader and a #1 New York Times bestselling author, Marci Shimoff’s Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out.
In her book, Marci Shimoff offers a breakthrough approach to being happy. Having things and circumstances – money, success, relationships, health – brings a certain kind of happiness, but this temporary experience of satisfaction or joy soon fades and we have to hurry up and fulfill the next desire to feel happy again. To experience true and lasting happiness, we can learn to access the deep state of peace and well-being that already exists within us—beyond the reach of external circumstances. Then, no matter what is happening in life, we can be happy for no reason.
While the book discusses the what and HOW of seven steps to being happy from the inside out, we’ll give you just a small sneak peek here:
Step six, one of our favorites – focuses on Living a Life Inspired by Purpose. Shimoff details three awesome happiness habits:
When we do what is empowering to us, we uplift others…and this is the basis for a celebration-based life. What an exciting idea to choose a journey that gladdens your heart and leads you to cultivate happiness for yourself and others in the deepest possible ways.
There is so much more to share, but more than anything…we just wanted to communicate that we are all on this ride together. We don’t have any of this down pat, and we all have many days we don’t live this way…but we are on this journey trying to live a life of happiness. Enjoy with us!
Our shipment of nearly 750 boxes of Consuela bags arrived and we team rallied to unload, inventory, and fulfill these bag orders for you as quickly as possible. We knew many of our amazing stores were waiting anxiously, and so our Consuela group motto echoed through the warehouse: “get ‘em in and get ‘em out”. With Starbucks in hand and dressed in our finest warehouse fashions, we were ready for several days of boxes, bumps, sweating, lifting, and packing to make sure you got your goods ASAP. We hope our bags arrived with as much care, love, and laughter as we put into them… and you felt extra joyful about the arrival of our bags!
What’s a day at Consuela without an embrace?
Our Consuela Opps. Ringmaster, Maggie, is affectionately known around the office as the “hugger.” She hugs the FedEx guy, the waiter at lunch, the folks meandering in to pick up their orders…and of course, all of US!
Who doesn’t want to be clutched in a blanket of love? It’s kind of become a tradition around here for us to say hello and goodbye with a full swoop of staff hugs. If you try to get out the door and forget, you may get a text on the way to your car that says, “Hug?”
This moving video piece was sent around the office; this is our tribe!
Enjoy and get your FREE HUGS here.
