About ColourStory
We're Lucy and Tracey — friends since we were about three years old, threading coloured wool through cardboard in the kindy art corner. Neither of us really left that corner, if we're honest. We just found a better thread.
Where it really started
We met as little ones in the kindy art corner — the best corner, obviously. Paint-covered hands, big imaginations, completely in our own world. And our absolute favourite thing? Sewing coloured wool through cardboard with blunt little needles. Bright, tactile, a little bit chaotic — and completely absorbing. Looking back, it makes perfect sense. We were always going to end up making something beautiful together.
Years later, there we were in the Christmas pageant, holding stars and quietly daydreaming. While everyone else was focused on their lines, we were probably somewhere else entirely — imagining, wandering, creating in our heads. We didn't know it then, but that creative space was always ours. It followed us into high school, into the art rooms, where the world made the most sense, and time disappeared.
Two girls who saw things a little differently. Who felt most at home when they were making something beautiful.
ColourStory isn't really a business we sat down and decided to start. It's more the natural next thing for a friendship that started in that art corner thirty-something years ago. We are still those girls — still daydreaming, still reaching for colour, still threading something beautiful together. And we wouldn't have it any other way.
India – the first time
There is something that must be said here — something almost forgotten, and yet, looking back, perhaps the most important thread in the whole story.
In the late 1990s, long before ColourStory existed, long before Singapore, block prints, and the journey to Jaipur, I found myself in Ahmedabad on a university exchange at the National Institute of Design — one of the finest design institutions in the world, then and now. I arrived from quiet, unhurried New Zealand and stepped into a city that operated on an entirely different frequency. Bustling, layered, extraordinary — a place of profound paradox, chaos, poverty and creativity sitting right next to each other on the same street, sometimes in the same breath.
"I arrived from quiet New Zealand and stepped into a city that operated on an entirely different frequency. India has never left me since."
The Fabric. The art. The Design. The sheer, unhesitating commitment to colour. It was unlike anything I had encountered — and I had the particular privilege of encountering it through the lens of one of India's most celebrated design communities. It blew my mind then. It has never quite un-blown it since.
India has always been one of my favourite countries. Returning to it for ColourStory — older, more knowing, with a purpose this time rather than simply wonder — I would still say without hesitation that it is the most colourful, most creative, most visually alive country I have ever visited. Some places mark you. India marked me the first time, and coming back only pressed the mark deeper.
The search
We've always loved colour. Loud prints, unexpected combinations, the kind of outfit that makes someone do a double-take. We wore it anyway — even when we got a few looks. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. The older we get, the less we care about the raised eyebrow. Genuinely one of the better parts of getting older.
Travel kept pouring fuel on that. Singapore. London. Istanbul. Spain. We moved through all of them with open eyes and the quiet hope of finding something worth bringing home. Not a souvenir — something alive. Something made with intention. What we found instead were shops full of fast fashion: garments that felt as disposable as they looked, fabrics without soul, colour without care. We wandered with a quiet, growing disappointment. Nothing edgy, nothing considered, nothing that made us stop and say yes — that.
There were many times we could remember hunting haberdashery shops in faraway places and stashing textiles — not yet knowing they were quietly becoming part of a dream.
The discovery
It was in Singapore, on the way home, that we decided to look differently. If the clothes on the rails couldn't give us what we were searching for, perhaps the fabric could. We started browsing. And then — there they were. Block-printed cottons. Simple. Intentional. Each one carried the memory of hands — real hands, unhurried hands — pressing pattern into cloth with a care that fast fashion had long since abandoned. The colours were honest. The order within them, and the beautiful chaos that order created, felt like a conversation between the person who made it and the person who would one day wear it. A curiosity stirred. Then a passion. Something inside our hearts shifted.
The beautiful chaos that order created felt like a conversation between the person who made it and the person who would wear it.
The beginning
Eventually, we traced those fabrics back to where they actually came from — workshops in Jaipur, artisans who've been block-printing cotton for generations — and we went to find them. Not to copy what they made. To understand it, and to build something with them, not just from them.
Our dream was simple, if a little ambitious: a brand that reflected our own style, supported the people who made it, and didn't cost the planet to exist. Desirable, practical, and doing some good along the way — not one of those at the expense of the other two.
That's ColourStory. Designed here in Aotearoa, made by hand in small batches by artisans in Rajasthan, we know by name. Real cotton, not plastic dressed up as fabric. Clashing prints and colour that doesn't ask permission, for anyone who'd rather be a little different than blend into a room.
If something needs mending down the track, bring it back to us — or come find us at one of our Christchurch meet-ups, where we get together to mend, alter, or make something with our hands instead of buying something new. Keep an eye on our socials for those.