On Friday, King Charles and Queen Camilla will touch down in Australia for a royal visit to Sydney and Canberra.
Perth entrepreneur Casey Bryden can’t help but think back to the last time the royal couple came Down Under nine years ago in 2015 and how it set her and her mother on the path of an “insane adventure”.
Back then, Bryden – who quit her job in marketing when she had her first child – was running a small hobby business with her mother, Jillian Intini, selling parasols online and at markets.
READ MORE: Where you can see King Charles and Queen Camilla during the visit
“My mum is a nurse, and she was seeing lots of women come through with skin cancer, and she wanted to change her own approach to sun care,” Bryden said.
“So she bought some old umbrellas at a swap meet, cut them up herself, went to Spotlight, bought block-out fabric and made her own parasol.
“It sounds tacky, but the thing that she made was actually really beautiful, and her friends loved it.
“I said, if we can make these, I feel like we could sell them.”
Sun Bella got off to a steady, but somewhat slow, start, Bryden said.
“It was really just plodding along in the background, we were selling them online and when a sale would come through Mum and I would text each other, ‘Sold one!'”
Then came the moment that changed everything, when Bryden heard that the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall would be heading to Perth.
“Someone said, ‘Camilla’s coming, you should try and get a parasol to her,'” Bryden said.
“So we set out on pretty much an impossible task, and never thought that it would happen.”
They set about crafting a personalised version of Sun Bella’s parasol, with the handle hand-turned by a local retired engineer at the Stirling Community Men’s Shed.
To get their parasol in Camilla’s hands, Bryden reached out to the Department of the Premier and Cabinet to see if they needed a gift for the Duchess.
“They accepted my offer – on the condition that they could pay us for it,” Bryden said.
READ MORE: King Charles says he won’t interfere if Australians vote for republic
But even then it wasn’t a certainty, Bryden said, with the department’s representative saying they couldn’t make any promises.
However, sure enough, the Duchess was soon filmed strolling the grounds of Government House with the parasol.
In a moment of serendipity for the mother and daughter duo, the royals’ visit to Western Australia coincided with an extreme heatwave.
The parasol almost never left Camilla’s hands during their entire sweltering visit to WA, Bryden said.
“It was unbearably hot. Poor Charles was given an Akubra and it was so hot that he kept taking it off, while Camilla looked effortlessly cool for the entire trip,” she said.
While it was a personal thrill to see Camilla using their parasol, what it did for their tiny business was crazy, Bryden added.
“We just really didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. We were still packing our own orders back in those days,” she said.
As Bryden, her mother and father were sorting out the orders on their kitchen table, Bryden said she noticed the sales rolling in on her open laptop.
“We were packing these parasols in bloody tubes, and the computer was sitting on the kitchen bench, but it was going ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, literally faster than we could pack one order,” she said.
In the space of two weeks, Sun Bella sold $20,000 worth of parasols, compared to their usual $1000 worth at the time.
“It catapulted our business from a hobby to a real business,” she said.
The genius marketing move, which many start-ups are likely to attempt to replicate during the royal visit this week, has had a lingering effect on their now successful business, Bryden said.
“I actually had a lady a couple of months ago who purchased a parasol, and she still had the newspaper clipping from 2015.”
Do you have a story? Contact reporter Emily McPherson at emcpherson@nine.com.au
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