Monique Chiari’s Clumsy Cushions

Monique Chiari’s (Class of 2014) brand, Clumsy, is a quirky and eccentric newcomer to Melbourne’s homewares scene.

She creates the softest, cosiest cushions, handmade from excess offcuts and stuffed with recycled water bottle fibres. More recently, she’s even started to dabble in creating handbags.

We sat down with Monique to talk about her entrepreneurial journey and her focus on sustainable practices.

Could you talk a little bit about your journey since leaving Santa Maria? What drew you to Melbourne?

I left pretty much straight after graduating. I remember a few days after I turned 18, I jetted straight to art school at RMIT and never came back. I always felt that I never really fit in with much of what was happening in Perth growing up, so moving over was just the natural next step.

What was the initial inspiration behind starting your business, Clumsy? 

It was born out of intense boredom with feelings of stagnation in my share house, with a desire to get some sort of joy from making things for my friends who were having a similar experience. It started in the second Melbourne lockdown when I wasn’t working and was watching too much Drag Race. I started cutting up my old band t-shirts and making them into cushions. I also got obsessively into Facebook Marketplace and saw a rough trade post advertising an old sewing machine. I offered to trade my big devil’s ivy plant for it, and it all kind of went from there. I learned how to sew all the basic stuff from YouTube tutorials, and everything just kind of expanded really organically from there.

Could you elaborate on the sustainable practices you use to reduce landfill? 

Clumsy has always operated as a minimal waste/upcycled practice. Over time I’ve just refined it to be as minimal waste and conscious as possible. I began Clumsy as limited edition runs of dead stock fabrics so that each cushion could not be sourced by any other makers and was also used instead of making its way to the bin. At the moment, every cushion is stuffed with a combination of fibres, mostly recycled water bottle fibres and offcuts from local designers blended. I’ve spent a lot of time refining Clumsy packaging so that there isn’t any unusable waste created from it. Every Clumsy product is packed 100% plastic-free, using compostable postage bags, and comes in a custom dust bag that you can wash your pillow in when it gets a little too much love.

Recently I’ve begun partnering with local makers in an offcut program which I’m hoping to expand into an off-cut business called Scrappy, where I collect unusable scraps and repurpose them into cushion stuffing. Small offcuts are unavoidable for all makers, no matter how conscious or waste-free orientated they are, and it’s something that most businesses don’t tend to discuss. Having a conscious local business that can rescue most of your waste and give it another life alleviates heaps of the guilt suppressed by many makers who care about how much they’re putting in the bin at the end of every day.