I can’t quite believe next month will officially be three years of Tahlia Paige. Three years since I set up the business with the wonderful help of Business Wales and Cardiff Met, with plenty of ups and downs along the way.
I had ideas for running a business before I even went to University, I remember talking to my then-boyfriend about helping wildlife and how I’d love to have my own business that does this one day. It seemed like a distant dream though and I focused on University for three years until the very last module approached.
The last module of my textiles course was the most open, so we all had a lot of freedom to do a project around exactly what we wanted. While I sat thinking about the projects I had done already, debating on some ideas that I wanted to do, I kept coming back to the endangered species and the business idea I had, why not start testing this out and see if it’s something I could make a real go of?
This was also the year the lockdown started, so suddenly I was leaving my student house and returning home for the lockdown, at the start of my last module with very little help, and realising that this was the perfect time to try something different.
So I started exploring endangered species and seeing what jumped out, hedgehogs were of interest from the start and I did a lot of reading about them, and how you can help out local ones if you have a garden. My parent’s house, where I was staying for the lockdown, had a huge garden kept quite wild, which was the perfect location for looking for a hedgehog.
After months of leaving various foods and water bowls in a makeshift house, watched closely by my night vision camera every night, I finally got a little visitor. The videos of him padding around his little house and crunching his biscuits were very cute, and he returned every night for months and months. Meanwhile, he was the starting point to begin to sketch some hedgehog motifs, which then turned into the hedgehog pattern.
The hedgehog pattern has remained the most popular one to this day, and will continue to be added to more and more products in the future!
