• MY COUNTRY BUSINESS
Sunbeam Jackie makes sun parasols with a cool, vintage vibe
Gorgeous parasols made from vintage-style fabrics are the trademark of handmade parasol company Sunbeam Jackie. It’s no surprise that founders, Katy and Charlie Napier, are talented artists with a wealth of design experience between them. The inspiration for the business came in 2011 when Katy and Charlie were watching Werner Herzog’s film Cobra Verde, and a scene with villagers carrying parasols and parading their chief in a West African village caught their eye. ‘We thought the parasols were fantastic and we’d never seen anything like them before,’ says Katy. ‘There was a scene with a number of open parasols piled upside down and that really struck us. We wanted to make something similar.’ Katy studied fine art at the University of Brighton before completing an MA at Central Saint Martins in scenography. Charlie, meanwhile, also studied fine art, but at Falmouth University, followed by an MA at Newcastle University. After meeting Charlie on a film set, Katy later moved up to Newcastle where he had a job working
on art installations at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Katy also landed a job nearby working on costumes for the popular ITV show Vera. The couple had been looking to start their own business for a while. ‘I had grown up in a small hotel and saw my dad doing his own thing and being his own boss and that was instrumental,’ says Charlie. Then inspiration struck when the couple watched Cobra Verde. ‘We didn’t have the money to make a prototype so we bought a fishing umbrella from Argos and some funky bright fabric from Goldhawk Road,’ says Charlie. ‘Katy made a makeshift canopy for the parasol and we took it out to the Northumbrian countryside and took a great photo of Katy holding it. The parasol was unfinished but we sent the shot to Misty Buckley, a friend of a friend who does production design for live shows and events. We got an email back saying, “I’ll have 10 of those for the artists’ warm-up area at Glastonbury”. We didn’t have 10 – we didn’t even have one! So we enlisted the help of some furniture makers to help design and manufacture them, then we went fabric
shopping at York racecourse car boot sale and spent £800 on vintage fabric – Katy’s aesthetic is layering and combining different styles of fabric – but we weren’t used to spending such a large amount of money.’ The couple had two months to get the 10 parasols completed. ‘We ended up assembling the parasol frames the night before Glastonbury!’ says Katy. Mark Homewood, the buyer for Designers Guild, and Josie da Bank, the creative director of Bestival, then spotted the parasols, too. ‘When Designers Guild ordered our parasols to sell in their shop that was a great seal of approval,’ says Katy. Having married and had their son, Sylvester, in 2011, Katy and Charlie decided to move down to Cornwall to be closer to family, and grow their parasol business there. The name Sunbeam Jackie was chosen as it was a nickname of a friend of theirs. ‘It wasn’t descriptive of anything – we didn’t want to describe what we did in a name in case we decided to do something different – it was our first lesson in branding,’ says Charlie. Charlie’s father wrote the name out and that became the logo design. Production of the parasols continued in Northumberland. ‘We were renting the parasols out at festivals, weddings and seasonal events, while we figured out what to do,’ says Charlie. The couple needed to think about growing the business and choosing their market. ‘We decided to use specialised no-expense-spared ash poles with stainless steel made by local craftsmen in Cornwall and that would define our market. So we redesigned the parasols and got European funding to build a website,’ says Charlie. Katy and Charlie bought a farm in West Cornwall and set up a workshop in the grain store there. They went to see Liberty buyer Bruce Lepere and he ordered 12 on the spot. Judy Hutson, owner of The Pig Hotels, then ordered some parasols and it was the start of another working relationship. Sunbeam Jackie now also supplies to lots of hotels, including Soho House, and interior designers around the world. ‘We’ve always known where the product needs to be seen – these are our bullseyes,’ says Charlie. ‘We’ve slowly built those connections. We knew the quality was there in terms of the manufacture. ‘Parasols in a commercial environment get a lot of use and we’ve now designed textile prints on outdoor fabric based on the vintage aesthetic,’ says Charlie. ‘There are 35 nuts and bolds and 84 rivets in every parasol so they look quite engineered.’ ‘We love what we do,’ says Katy. ’We’re working for ourselves in beautiful surroundings.’
What we love about our work... ❝we appreciate that the business gives us the opportunity to make our living as artists and the freedom of ourselves❞ working for