All That Jazz

Manjeet Singh recalls how he and his wife, Jasvinder Kaur Bedi built up the most celebrated name in the bindi business - Jazzy Bindi.

Afamily wedding in India during the early part of 1999 prompted my wife Jass to buy some bindis for her self as well as for other family members in India and the UK. The initial purchase was somewhat large for one person, so upon our return to London, when Jass decided to allocate the bindies to all her friends and family members, she then saw what she had actually bought, which was enough to for a little shop.

As the next few months progressed all I would find in the room was boxes and packets of bindies, which later started to appear on my desk and all over the place. As I was looking at them so often I would see certain designs and re-arrange them in colour combinations and styles. Jass started to wear the bindies that I had styled and was complimented often and asked where she got her bindies from? Soon enough she had a few of her friends asking me to do similar styles for them and we ended up selling the bindies to them.
It was just a matter of a few more months before we would embark on a journey that would make Jazzy Bindi a household name. It was in July 99 that we took a small stall at an event which was held in a local park, and we were amazed to find that not only were Asian ladies coming to buy our goods, we were also attracting alot of attention from the English community.

I noticed an article in the newspaper where the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Booth was shown wearing an Asian outfit with a tiny silver bindi. I then prepared a selection of our new designs and sent them to her. To our utter amazement we had a hand written letter from her thanking us for the collection o f bindies and wishing us luck with our new venture.

My sister has now joined us and we are able to bring in more fresh ideas on producing bindies and we have started to add 15 to 20 designs every month to our ever growing collection.

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