It’s always seemed strange to me that Fashion Design as a long-standing industry has never really had its own tools. I had a great idea that I thought would be immensely useful to fellow designers.

So I set to work finalizing my first product and created Hokey Croquis, a business dedicated to innovating tools specific to fashion design. I’m so excited about our signature product, the Fashionflat Sketchpad with disappearing croquis. Imagine how much faster your creative ideas will come to life when you need not bother with light boxes and layer upon layer of tracing paper! We’ve got all sorts of clever product lines in the making, and we hope you will find them as indispensable as we do!

You can see that I’m thrilled about the prospects for Hokey Croquis, but who am I? I’m Tamar Daniel, fashion designer, and founder of Hokey Croquis. By way of introduction, I’ve long had a passion for fashion, cultivated by both my mother and grandmother whilst growing up in London, England. My mother is an artist, who, even when I was a toddler, schlepped me around fine art museums, encouraged me to experiment with different mediums and taught me to record what I was seeing on paper. My grandmother, a Viennese lady of exquisite taste and deft hands, taught me how to knit, crochet, and sew, and she fed my growing love for beautiful clothing with hand-me-downs from her fabulous collection of 1960s couture. As a young girl, I would spend many a happy Sunday sitting alone in the Victoria and Albert Museum, sketching the Edwardian gowns I admired in my little notebook, quietly sowing the seeds of a lifelong passion. Naturally, I majored in fashion design at Shenkar College Israel. While there, I took a summer in London and interned on Oxford Street at TopShop, working with one of their knit wear suppliers to design fashion tops.

Upon graduation I was privileged to have my graduating collection be accepted to the prestigious ITS competition in Trieste, Italy, where I was one of just six prize winners! Watching my clothes walking down the catwalk at Trieste got me addicted for life. Post-graduation, I freelanced in Israel for Segal Dekel, built my fashion network, and then took an irresistible offer to relocate to the United States for a position with Anthropologie. With my husband and three boys in tow, I came to the U.S to learn the ropes of commercial design, as well as the realities of corporate America.

Today, my family is amazingly patient with me as I launch this new business and contribute something new -- something I hope will make fashion design more accessible and enable would-be designers and pros alike to effortlessly create inspired designs.

My wish is that our products will help bring out your best, most creative design work. And when that happens, I’d love to see what you produce. Please share your lovely designs here with us, as I hope this will become a place where we can all come to inspire, and be inspired.