Jellies back on the fashion menu
ONCE the must-have footwear for kids, the humble Jelly Baby has made a recent revival in the fashion stakes.
WHAT started as a bit of a laugh for Joel Gubieski has turned into a bit of a money-spinner.
Like many children of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gubieski spent his summers in colourful plastic sandals called Jelly Babies.
They were all-condition shoes — kids could play football in them, go climbing in them through deep rock pools or wear them to the shops — and Gubieski’s love for them never died.
“In 2006, my mum called me saying she had found a one-off pair of Jelly Babies,” he said. She bought them for her son, who wore them to university where he is studying arts and law.
“There was an unbelievable response when I started wearing them around uni and other places.” His peers all wanted a pair of the rubbery sandals, but shoe shops had stopped stocking them after they lost appeal with the younger set.
“My idea was why don’t we rebrand it and make them to appeal to the market 20 years later.”
Gubieski, who studies French, exchanged emails with the French manufacturers, who still had the original moulds for the shoes. He was then put in contact with the local importer, who was initially sceptical about the idea of selling them to trendy 20-somethings.
His next task was finding stockists so he reached into his phone and pulled out a few phone numbers — a friend of his, who was in year 10, at school built him a website, another friend agreed to model the shoes and someone else who was handy with a camera was keen to take some snaps.
“I sent it [the website] round to a few stores and Fat replied saying they wanted to have a meeting and see some samples.”
The funky fashion chain agreed to stock the sandles in its three Melbourne stores, and last week Gubieski was asked to organise another shipment after the first lot sold like hotcakes.
“I just find it fun,” he said of his entrepreneurship. “I had a lot of conviction that it had to work.”
Enquiries: www.jellyrevival.com.au