Our Story    

   

      Two women. Twelve years.
One studio about to close.    

 

        

      Twelve years ago, in a small house in Queenstown, our family was hit with the kind of crisis you can't prepare for. I had just lost my livelihood. The bills didn't stop. The mortgage didn't stop. Within weeks, the bank was sending letters, and the reality of losing our home — the home where Sarah grew up, where we had built our life — became impossible to ignore.    

   

      Sarah was 22 years old. She was supposed to be living her own life. Studying. Travelling. Making the kind of mistakes you make in your twenties when the worst thing in the world is a bad grade. Instead, she came home. She put her own future on hold. She looked at her mother — at me — and decided that we were going to find a way out of this together.    

       

The Kitchen Table

   

      We didn't have money. We didn't have investors. We didn't have a business plan or a website or any idea what we were doing. What we had was each other and a small living room with a kitchen table at one end. We started by sourcing classic, well-made coats — the kind of pieces I had always loved and could never quite find on the high street.     

   

      We posted photos online with descriptions we wrote ourselves. We packaged orders by hand, late at night, with the heating turned down to save money. The first months were brutal. Suppliers took advantage of two women they assumed wouldn't push back. Orders went wrong. Stock arrived late. There were nights when Sarah and I sat at that kitchen table at 2am, exhausted, and asked each other if we should just stop. We never did.    

       

      The first hundred customers became our messengers. They wrote us emails. They told their friends. They sent us photos of themselves in our coats and notes that brought us to tears more than once. One woman in Christchurch ordered a coat for her mother's 70th birthday. The card she sent us afterwards is still framed in our studio today.    

   

      We realised something quickly: the women who bought from us weren't just shopping. They were tired. Tired of disposable fast fashion that fell apart in a season. Tired of being treated like an afterthought once they passed 40. They wanted what we wanted. Quality that lasts. Cuts that flatter real bodies. Clothes that respect the women who wear them.    

       

Twelve Years On — and a Studio About to Close

   

      Today, Aurora Classics is something neither of us could have imagined. We saved the house. We built the small Queenstown studio that Sarah and I have worked from for over a decade. Tens of thousands of women across New Zealand have welcomed us into their wardrobes.    

   

      And now, twelve years later, we are doing the most difficult and most exciting thing we have ever done as a brand.    

   

      We are leaving the Queenstown studio.    

   

      After signing the lease on a larger studio in Australia — the country where so many of our customers have been finding us in the last year — we have made the decision to close our original Queenstown space and move everything across the Tasman. The studio where every coat we have ever made was inspected, packed, and sent. The studio with Margaret's letter framed on the wall. The studio with a kettle that has boiled at least once an hour for twelve years.    

   

      In two weeks, the keys go back to the landlord. The lights go off. We walk into the next chapter of Aurora Classics.    

       

The Moving Sale — Why Everything Is at Up to 70% Off

   

      When we sat down to do the maths on moving the warehouse, the answer was uncomfortable.    

   

      Every coat, every box, every roll of fabric in our Queenstown studio has to be packed, shipped across the ocean, and unpacked on the other side. The cost of moving the remaining stock turned out to be higher than the value of giving it away at moving-sale prices.    

   

      So we made the decision. Everything in the studio is now at up to 70% off. Not as a marketing tactic. Not as manufactured urgency. Because we genuinely cannot afford to ship it, and we would rather these coats end up in the wardrobes of women who appreciate them than in storage we cannot pay for.    

   

      When the studio empties — when the last box leaves and the door closes — anything that didn't sell goes into one final shipment to Australia, and reposts there at standard prices under the new studio. There is no second wave at these prices. There is no extension. The lease ends when the lease ends.    

   

      If a piece is still available to add to your cart, it means we still have stock. When it disappears, it is genuinely gone — because the studio is genuinely closing.    

 

   

      What We Believe    

   

      We believe a coat should last. We believe a 60-year-old woman deserves the same care as a 25-year-old. Quality isn't a marketing word — it's a decision we make every time we pack a parcel. And after twelve years in this small studio, we still believe that two women who refuse to give up can build something that matters.    

   

      Thank you for being part of the chapter that ends in two weeks. And thank you in advance for being part of the one that begins next.    

        

      With all our love,
      Elise and Sarah    

   

      Queenstown, New Zealand · 2013–2026