Q. Tell us a bit about you: what’s your background and why did you create Clumsy?

Hey! I’m Mon – cushion maker, designer, business owner. My weeks consist of local pie reviews, talking about Sovereign Hill, pretending to speak fluent Italian, giggling too loudly with my boyfriend, working part-time at an art gallery and several hundred other jobs – please hire me. 

Clumsy became a way for me to stay in contact with my friends in the harsh first Melbourne lockdowns. I was able to ride around and drop cushions off to my friends all around the place and I guess it just developed really organically from there, mostly over Instagram.

Q. Clumsy’s pillows are – in the best possible way – very quirky. What inspired these designs? 

When I was at art school I was doing digital drawing and making quilts and some of the designs of the quilts have inspired the shapes of the original Clumsy. Most of the shapes have been iterations of that core Clumsy shape. 

Q. What has been your favourite shape so far? 

Hmm … I think it must be the crescent moon croissant-shaped pillows I made last year. I decided it would be funny if I wrote down all of my secrets and chopped them up and hid them into pillows, so I did that – I mixed them in with lavender and green tea and made scented moon pillows filled with my secrets.  

Q. What is your creative process like – how do you get yourself into a creative headspace? 

Most of my ideas come from in-jokes with my friends TBH. For instance I traded my friend Brekstacy from the Brekstacy Skylab breakfast show an egg-shaped pillow. There’s the obvious humour, but also because he looks like an egg. 

Most of the time my ideas start from some sort of silly joke. The creative process usually starts off with me coming up with something ridiculous and seeing how it floats. I also love collaborating! So usually I start by bouncing an idea off one of my creative friends and go from there.