I love sharing how design projects evolve, so I wanted to walk you through the creation of our Studio DIY x Kip & Co bedding collection. From the first mood board to the final samples, this collaboration grew from a chance meeting in Los Angeles to a finished product released a few years later.
I discovered Kip & Co a few years ago while decorating our home after Arlo’s birth. I was drawn to the playful, colorful Australian design scene and kept spotting their joyful products. We connected on Instagram and they sent a tiny blanket for Arlo, which made me even more excited about their work.
The opportunity to collaborate began in September 2017, when Hayley told me Kip & Co were expanding into the U.S. They had a short stop in LA for a trade show and we squeezed in a meeting, despite only having about 30 minutes between flights. We ended up talking while sitting on suitcases by the curb, sketching out ideas about kids’ interiors and how a collaboration could help both our goals. That brief conversation set everything in motion.
We followed up the next week and then spent the next six months planning—discussing which items made the most sense, where the products would be sold, and how to make the partnership flow. Once the agreement was in place, the design process began.
My first step was a mood board. Having just finished Arlo’s room, I felt inspired by the use of vivid color in kids’ spaces. I wanted this collection to be flexible enough to suit a bright, rainbow-filled room like Arlo’s, but also to complement softer, pastel nurseries. Fruit motifs felt like a natural fit—both for my own past projects and for Kip & Co’s aesthetic—so fruit became a central theme alongside playful stripes. For cushions, I envisioned a sun-shaped pillow with fringe rays and a bold pom-pom cushion to highlight Kip & Co’s love of texture and trim.
The Kip & Co design team took my concept board and returned several pattern and cushion options. We refined details over months—ensuring patterns coordinated without feeling too matchy, choosing stripe widths, and balancing scale across prints. In the end we settled on three prints (a wide stripe, a large fruit motif, and a small fruit pattern) plus the two cushions I proposed.
Color selection was a critical step. We spent hours choosing the right hues, especially multiple shades of yellow to give sun and fruit elements depth without clashing. I shared a detailed palette with the team to finalize the look.
We also approved a custom product label—Kip & Co suggested a rainbow foil label and it became one of my favorite finishing touches.
With designs finalized, Kip & Co guided which prints would work best across different product types, and then sent the specs to their manufacturers. The first round of fabric and material samples arrived in September 2018. Seeing the textiles in hand was exciting and practical—small tweaks were needed, like brightening the blue on the quilt back and adjusting greens on the large fruit print. We also refined the pom-pom colors to ensure they matched the overall palette.
After final approvals, production began. Manufacturing and shipping took several months. In February 2019, the Australia team received their production samples and photographed them for marketing and product listings. A month later, we received our samples for a shoot. My original plan to have the nursery complete before the shoot didn’t quite happen, but the shoot became a delightful preview of how the collection would look in a nursery corner—and of course, we added pieces to Arlo’s room as well.
A few weeks later, we launched the collection. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and seeing the bedding in homes has been so rewarding. On a personal note, Arlo now brings the swaddle and crib sheet to school for nap time—I can vouch the swaddle is incredibly soft and a real favorite.
This collaboration took nearly two years from first chat to launch, and it was an excellent experience. The Kip & Co team were a joy to work with, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring this colorful collection to life. If you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the making of the line, let me know what else you’d like to see—I’d be happy to share more about the design choices or production process.