Just Breathe.

“Laugh Easy” is an essential part of our Consuela covenant.  We’ve taken some lessons from one of our collective favy books—Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.  It is a must read for all newbies in our company and we strongly advocate it for anyone thinking about the “soul” of a company.  One of the biggest teachings we’ve integrated is the belief that if we get the culture of our company right…everything else will happen naturally as a result of happy people doing things they love.

We want to build relationships where we treat each other like family.  We make it a point to take time to play together (after working very hard). For example, one day we took a boat out and cruised Town Lake in Austin for a couple hours at the end of a busy week.  With delicious snacks and libations on hand, Clay served as our Captain O’ Captain and eased us down the river at the ripping speed of 1mph. We shared, joked, laughed, and breathed in the springtime air together.

As Hsieh writes so poignantly in his book, the bottom line is “about teamwork and having fun and not taking ourselves too seriously.  It’s about growth, both personal and professional.  It’s about achieving the impossible.  It’s about openness, taking risks, and not being afraid to make mistakes. But most of all, it’s about having faith that if we do the right thing for each other, then in the long run we will succeed and build something great.”

Enjoy the journey of creating your culture!

Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy Friday all!  We want to wish a very blessed Mother’s Day weekend to all of you special women. Mothering is the ultimate selfless act, and we celebrate you for cultivating so much love.

To honor you all, we wanted to share with you an uplifting video from DiscoverHope, one of the philanthropic organizations we support.  DiscoverHope provides an opportunity for women in poverty to create their own prosperity through microcredit, entrepreneurship, and training.  By gaining access to capital and education, women who are historically denied credit and education build support to create their own businesses, lift their families out of poverty, and shape their own destinies.

We’ll keep you posted about our proud sponsorship of DiscoverHope’s upcoming Band Together for Hope concert featuring Del Castillo on June 15 in Austin. Enjoy the footage of over 200 mothers rejoicing; we hope you do the same!

Be Weird.

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!

  • What do people like about spending time with me?
  • How do I help people (family, friends, clients or co-workers)?
  • What do people say when they recommend me to a friend?
  • What are my talents and passions?
Happy Monday, everyone!

Roadmap to Consuela culture

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!


Happy For No Reason.

 

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!