At Under Lucky Stars we love stories. We love them so much, we collect and publish our favorite stories shared with us by our customers.
The other day a dear customer called Kyle asked how we came up with the idea behind Under Lucky Stars. To be honest I wish I had a better story, but here is how it went.
In 2016 I moved back to Barcelona, Spain. I had spent the previous year being "nomadic", living out of a suitcase and traveling in Europe. I didn't have a lot of stuff, definitely no home-decor items, since I had sold almost everything I owned previously when I started the trip.
Now, ready to settle again, I was looking for cool home decor items for my new home. I remembered I had had a star chart on my wall as a kid, right above my bed. Unfortunately, I can't find a better photo so you'll have to believe that the blurry blue circles on this photo are actually a constellation map:
So, I thought something like that would be a cool wall decor in my bedroom, since stars fit nicely in the night theme. Sleeping under the stars, albeit printed, sounded like a nice idea. But then I thought, what if it's not just a generic star chart, but a sky that represents an event in time. Something meaningful, something important, a special moment in my life.
At the time I wasn't sure if it was even possible to do this, so I did some research. Turned out it was doable. Being a software engineer and having a fairly strong interest in science and astronomy, I embarked on this journey and started working on this project myself. At the time I had a full-time job so this was an evening/weekend pet-project, I was building it up slowly. In a few of months, it was ready to be launched.
I felt the name "Under Lucky Stars" described the product well. We all have moments in our lives when we feel as though the stars aligned for us, and some sort of cosmic force -- whether you believe in such thing or not -- smoothed our way and guided us to something great. When things just fall into place. But it has a double meaning to me. I think that I'm an extremely lucky person. It's hard to even count my blessings. I was born healthy, into a loving family, in a peaceful time in history, and in a prosperous part of the world. I found my passion early on and I love what I do. I have amazing people surrounding me and to look up to. I could go on, but let's just say I feel I was really born under lucky stars.
When we went online on November 2nd, 2016, we were the first company to ever sell custom-made star maps, capturing special moments. Nothing like this existed before. After a very slow start and almost giving up on the whole project, we sold our very first map on the 24th of November to a lovely lady called Margaret from San Francisco.
"The rest is history" as they say.