Building the Palace

With the construction underway on a (hopefully) successful business, there are a bunch of tips and tricks you can learn from experts online flaunting their brand recognisability on social media, and an equal, if not greater, amount you're forced to pick up yourself that weren't on the blueprints.

As it stands, working with family isn't exactly how it is on the cards. At wildly different stages in your life, it's inevitable siblings and parents will be taking on unequal work, and the brunt of it usually falls to the eldest—while the others scramble to make themselves useful. The benefit to this is... Well, we're still working on that. But, at the very least, no one gets penalised if they momentarily lose professionalism at the end of a long day of work. And, there's no shortage of business-based discussion when you're siblings round the clock!

But no one tells you quite what the journey is like when you're building brick-by-brick from the ground up. The amount of milestones you hit in the first few weeks, then the veritable leap 'til your next one. First necklace, first pair of earrings, (first time you forget the names of your extensive colour range), first blog post...to the ones you can't control, like the first sale, the first pre-order, the first national holiday.

Launching a shop out of our home—which is not a palace (yet!)—during a pandemic was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but not an unwelcome one given the state of employment right now. Having life temporarily on standstill, at least here in the UK, allowed us to create our first designs to reflect the Begums behind the business. A combination of gemstones and the celestial to showcase a magpie-esque love for all things shiny, and fun, trendy designs to please our resident earring hoarder, places a little bit of ourselves in every piece we create. We want to walk the line between classic and unique, currently focusing on necklaces and earrings for every occasion, because if we love them, we hope you will too. Our collections will grow in time—and none of us will say no to getting better at what we do—but we've laid the foundations now, and the influence of the Moonlight Palace brand remains under construction.

If we end up with brand recognition for the constant building-site analogies from a person who knows nothing about architecture, at least we'll have done something right.