Lessons Learned- A mother, daughter travel story

If you are new to Mariposa Skies, Welcome! In these posts you will find sprinklings of my mom. She passed away in late September 2020. These posts will be in honor of her and everything she loved and our adventures together.

While I was working on what I wanted to do this year for Mariposa Skies, it just didn't feel right not having my mom be involved. This will be a little "korner" I will keep an open space for my mom within my business. After all, she is part of the very fabric that makes up Mariposa Skies.

That is why I decided that I will be compiling a couple of my mom's most favorite things together in posts throughout the blog. These will be things like…

• Travel stories of our adventures together and lessons learned
• Her favorite books (she was always reading!)
• Her most loved recipes and more!

And of course, there will always be one of my mom's favorite fashion pieces from the Mariposa Skies collection that will be highlighted as well. She was my biggest fan and still is! 🥰

I wanted to start this with a travel story and some of the lessons learned along our travels together. As well as the reason why I decided to call these pieces Kathy's Korner.

Lessons Learned- A travel story

After my mom retired from being a teacher, she had so many creative ideas in her head and on Pinterest 🥰 . One day I mentioned that she should start a blog. She liked the idea well enough to think of a name. We came up with Kathy's Korner.

We thought it could be a blog about all the things she loved and knew- being a mother, grandmother and teacher. Well, turns out she didn't really love to blog. However, not all that energy was lost because that blog got us into our first Fashion Convention in Tokyo, Japan. How, you may ask? Keep reading…

In the early days of Mariposa Skies, I had a general idea of where I wanted to go with it as a business, but nothing solid. I had just come home from my first buying trip from Morocco and I had the travel bug and so did my mom. So our sights landed on Japan!

As we were prepping for this first buying trip to Japan, I knew I wanted to go to Tokyo. I loved the street fashion I had seen there and I wanted to explore it more. My mom was always up for an adventure, so off we went!

I found out there was a fashion convention in town during the time we were going to be there. Perfect! All I had to do was to have a business card to get in and my "associate" (aka mom 🥰 ) had to have a business card of her own as well.

Brilliantly I thought we could use her blog's name as her business!

Once we got to there, we had to separate to get into the fashion convention. She was nervous and to be honest I was too. I got in without a hitch. However, the person who was checking my mom in wasn't quite getting the idea of my mom's "business." So I said she was my business associate, which confused them even more because we had different business names.

I was not going to give up though, we took 3 different trains to get to this place on the outskirts of Tokyo! Luckily, after some more explaining she got her pass to get in. Phew!

I would love to tell you the Fashion convention was everything and more! But alas it was not.

In my mind, I was hoping it would be all these amazing designers from all around Japan, I was convinced this would be the start of connecting with Japanese fashion designers!

However, it turned out to be all international designers from Europe wanting to get into the Japanese Fashion Industry. Whoops! 🤦‍♀️

Not all was lost though. There were some lessons learned along the way…

1. I was not going to find the connections I wanted with Japanese Artisans in a big fancy fashion convention.
2. My mom and I discovered we navigate big international cities together quite well.
3. It's the journey, not the destination, that is fun and exciting. But more on that travel story in the next travel story edition of Kathy's Korner. 😘