Life In Love and Business with Banabae
We sat down with Australian apparel and homeware brand Banabae to chat about love, life and business.
Banabae: Who are you and how did you meet & fall in love?
IMO: We are Imogen and Al, husband and wife duo behind furniture and lifestyle brand AL + IMO.
I (Imo) was working in a restaurant in Melbourne back in 2012 and met a girl named Anna, we’d worked together a couple of shifts and she told me that she was about to head off to India. Having always wanted to go, I spontaneously booked a ticket to meet her there … as you do when you're 20! We travelled around for a month and about six months after we arrived home she celebrated her 21st birthday. I went along to the party and at some stage her older brother stood up and said a speech. The next day I literally slid into his DM’s and asked him out for a drink, he admitted that he’d noticed me in all of his sister’s travel photos and agreed. We spent about 2 nights apart in the first month, we fell in love hard and fast. That was almost 10 years ago, we started our business in 2015, got married in 2019 and welcomed our beautiful daughter Marigold in 2021.
Banabae: Where have you settled down in the world together? How did you get to this place and make it your own?
IMO: We live on the Surf Coast, VIC in a farmhouse that we rent. It’s a beautiful house set amongst the gumtrees and we absolutely love it here. We moved down from Melbourne in 2016 as we were looking for space to create and were travelling down here every weekend to surf. The Surf Coast has a really great creative vibe, we’re 10 minutes from iconic Bells Beach so you can only begin to imagine how many businesses were born along this coastline from the desire to live a balanced lifestyle of surfing & creating. We’ve filled our house with furniture that we’ve made including our bed and all of the furniture in Goldie’s bedroom. We are about to start our first family house build in Torquay where we’ve worked with a local architect and builder to come up with a modern and sustainable family beach house. It’s a move that is very exciting but also will be very sad leaving this house as we’ve made so many beautiful memories here!
Banabae: You are blessed to celebrate life in love, and double blessed to create life in biz together. This is a big and inspiring thing for many couples. Please tell us a bit about what you two create together, why you started this venture and where you see it heading?
IMO: We run a furniture making company and lifestyle brand called Al + Imo where we specialise in making timber bed frames and bedroom furniture from locally sourced Australian hardwoods. Our goal in life is to create, live and inspire which is why you’ll find much more than furniture on our website.
Our business started a little by accident, Al was a carpenter by trade and agreed to build us a bed frame as at the time we couldn’t afford any of the furniture we liked. We built our first bed in our inner-city sharehouse carport with basic carpentry tools and no plan. At the end of the day Al turned to me and said, that’s the best day’s work I’ve ever done and it was in that moment we knew this is what we needed to be doing. From there we built beds for family and friends until we decided to try and turn it into a business.
We moved away from the city, created a website and started to tell people we were furniture makers and the rest is history.
I think the most exciting thing about running our own business is the limitless opportunities to take our vision in any direction that we like. We started simply as two people making beds and now have turned our company into a lifestyle brand where not only do we get to wake up everyday and build beautiful things but we can also inspire others to experience the joy of making through our DIY Projects or inspire them to start their own businesses by listening to our Podcast.
Al is an incredibly talented maker, so to be able to walk out to the walkshop with an idea and see him turn into a tangible product is pretty amazing, I am very grateful for the creative partnership we have together.
The next project? Well, we’ve just launched a new business called Furniture Friends, and have developed an online course to help other makers turn their passion into profit.
We know that when a customer invests in a handmade piece of furniture they’re less likely to throw it away. It’s our mission to see more custom furniture in people’s homes across the world and less crap in landfill. Rather than expanding and producing more furniture ourselves we know we can have more impact globally if we use our skills to help other makers successfully run their businesses.
This feels like a natural next step and we’re really excited to share our skills to help other makers!
Banabae: How do you celebrate Valentine's Day? Will you gift and spoil on this day, or is everyday Valentines Day?
IMO: Ohh good question! Valentine’s Day is the week after my birthday so it always feels like a bit of an afterthought but we always try to do something nice. I think it’s so important to celebrate life and love regardless of whether it’s a holiday or not. Al and I make a point to tell each other everyday that we love each other, we practice gratitude often and keep an open dialogue in our relationship. We know that to be the best parents to Goldie that we need to be strong and unified as a couple. I think this year we’ll take a picnic down to one of our favourite beaches, it’ll be our first Valentine’s Day as a family so we’ll make sure we show each other a lot of love and create some new special memories.
Shop the look
The Lover / The Dreamer Pillowcase Set
Rad Dad Cord Cap Tan
Peach Ribbed Organic Cotton Long Sleeve Onesie
The Lover / The Dreamer Pillowcase Set
Rad Mama Organic Cotton Tee
More On Family
G’day!
We’re Al + Imo
We’re a husband and wife duo, building our dream life one DIY project at a time. We are proudly self-taught, furniture-makers, business owners, designers and stylists.
DIY RUNS IN OUR DNA
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