Founder Story

I launched my first product business this week. Three mugs. Three words my family has been saying my whole life.

Khabardar. Zabardast. Daffa Ho Ja.

If you grew up in a South Asian household, you already know these words. You heard them from the kitchen, across the dinner table, maybe hollered from the top of the stairs. They weren't just expressions — they were a whole emotional language. Warning, wonder, and a very affectionate get out of here.

I started my career at Pier 1 Imports as a Visual Merchandising Manager — because I was always the person who noticed how things looked and felt before anything else. That instinct led me through 25 years in corporate retail: managing stores, buying for 50 locations across Canada at Ten Thousand Villages, running fashion brands across Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, then as a Country Manager and Regional Brand Manager for some of the most values-driven beauty brands in the world — LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics in Qatar and Oman, and Sephora Middle East.

And the whole time, there was something sitting quietly in the background. A graphic designer by training — George Brown, typography, illustration, package design — who never quite stopped seeing the world through that lens.

When I moved back to Canada, something clicked. All of it — the brand strategy, the product instinct, the design eye, the desi girl who grew up hearing these words at full volume — finally had somewhere to go.

Chay88 Creative Studio is a South Asian diaspora lifestyle brand. We're starting with typographic home goods — mugs featuring Urdu and Punjabi phrases that the aunties, the uncles, the desi moms and the gen Z cousins all know by heart. Words that hold a whole universe of feeling in just a syllable or two.

Because the language of our homes deserves to live on our shelves, not just in our memories.

This is for the diaspora kid who translated for their parents and roasted them in the same breath. For the one who grew up code-switching before they knew what it meant. For everyone who has ever felt like their culture was the richest thing about them — and somehow the most invisible in the spaces they occupied.

Three mugs is a humble beginning. But I've spent 25 years learning exactly how to grow something from the ground up.

Chay88 launched July 1st.

Follow along — I'd love for you to be here from day one. 🫖

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