Our Story

The Christmas Cart started off as the side hustle to our side-hustle, it was a labour of love, in fact for the first year we ran it from our homes with glitter everywhere! BUT it wasn’t our first business. The Christmas Cart was started to help us promote our first business, Milestones 2 Memories, which was an online store with a range of products to help people get their photos off their phones and into their lives.

With Kym’s amazing design skills, we had developed a range of beautiful bespoke photo gifts, but little did we know that technology was moving so fast and creating a photo gifts was going to become very accessible, consequently most people weren’t going to need our customised service.

During our first year of running Milestone 2 Memories we set up a pop-up shop during the peak of Christmas with a display featuring our photo gifts, and selling personalised Christmas baubles to draw people in (i.e. side hustle to a side hustle). It worked, we were flooded with orders, and we soon discovered that there was a lot more interest in our personalised Christmas baubles than our beautiful photo gifts.

We did feel a little deflated, but then when the shopping centre asked us to do pop-ups at 2 more of their centres the following year with our personalised Christmas baubles, we thought, ok, let’s see where this goes. At one point we had 23 pop-up shops from Melbourne to Queensland.

A couple of years in we decided we needed to leverage everything we had learnt and build a website for The Christmas Cart. In 2010 we launched our online store with just 16 personalised products. Over the coming years we grew our products to include many more personalised Christmas decorations and gifts, as well as a huge range of non-personalised products such as florals, ornaments and Christmas crafting supplies. We now have over 3,000 products on our purely Christmas website.

We feel it is important that we keep The Christmas Cart dedicated purely to Christmas. Let’s face it, it is the biggest seasonal celebration of them all and with so many products, we don’t want our customers coming to our online store and feeling confused and overwhelmed.

We were so excited to see The Christmas Cart growing and with its growth we now had a team of amazing people that supported our dream.  Consequently, it became important to us to keep the core of our team together throughout the year and so our next business baby was born, Gifts & Keepsakes.

Like The Christmas Cart, Gifts & Keepsakes started with personalised product at its heart. We are strong believers in adding a personal touch to every celebration. Over time we have grown our range to include thoughtful and unique gifts for every celebration including milestone birthdays (or any other birthday in between!), weddings, anniversaries, welcoming a new baby, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Anzac Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or honouring a lost loved one. 

Additionally, as our love of decorating has grown, we have introduced a range of celebration décor to Gifts & Keepsakes.  We pride ourselves on providing beautiful and affordable decorations to take any celebration to the next level. We are also excited to be growing a range of craft products and DIY kits that allow you to tap into your creative side and add your own unique style to every occasion.