It’s been a whirlwind year for Beth Haller LaSala and Christina Livada, personally and professionally. Together, they run ChappyWrap, a Boston-based brand that produces high-quality blankets inspired by New England.
The company has been around for 13 years now. Haller LaSala founded it back in 2006. Since then, customers have been going crazy for the cozy, cotton-blend, Jacquard-woven blankets that come in a variety of patterns and sizes. They’re made with both home decor and snuggling in mind.
“That’s really why we do what we do,” says Livada. “When you boil it down, we want to spread comfort to more and more people.”
In 2018, Haller LaSala’s original business partner decided to retire, but Haller LaSala herself wasn’t ready to move on. Instead, she brought her daughter, her casual collaborator and informal sounding board, into ChappyWrap formally and full-time.
“Christina has brought a huge breath of fresh air to the company,” says Haller LaSala. “We were set in our way, how we were doing things.”
Bringing Livada onboard marked the beginning of a year-long turnaround for ChappyWrap, but the journey was bumpy at times.
“I was working as a speech language pathologist in a private school setting. It was very, very different, and something that I loved,” says Livada. “It has been and continues to be a steep learning curve for me. Beth has a lot of business background, and she has obviously been running the company for a long time, but it was a lot for me to learn — a big change, but a really exciting one.”
Post-Rebrand
After Livada’s and Haller LaSala’s collaborative repositioning, ChappyWrap has developed an undeniable brand identity. “We transitioned the direction the company was going in,” explains Livada. “We redid our website and our logo. We released a bunch of new designs. We spent the year revising the company and saying, ‘Who do we want to be?’ It’s been such a fun creative process.”
One thing’s for sure, the Boston-based brand embodies New England to its core. Customers can shop 75 blanket designs — 26 of these have just been introduced — broken into collections named, “Classics,” “Places” and “Heritage.” The blankets also come in three different sizes, as well as new baby-sized offerings.
“We definitely have strong New England ties and roots,” says Livada. “Even with those designs that are less themed, less nautical, less preppy or coastal, we’ve drawn inspiration from New England in their name. We have a new neutral pattern called Oyster Cove Diamonds. We have one that’s called Long Wharf Herringbone.”
“As part of the rebranding, we broke all our blankets down into various collections,” she says. “We have a Classics collection which is more like home decor, more neutral colors and patterns. Things that you would use on the back of your couch in your living room as an accent. We have the Nantucket collection because we know that we have a fun, preppy, nautical side.”
Haller LaSala gets excited over ChappyWrap’s Places collection, aka map blankets. “It started out with the Cape and the Islands, and for the last couple of years, that blanket has been our bestseller,” she says. “So, we added a lot of other places. We have people recommend different geographic areas where they would like to see those blankets. They’re very unique, which is why people enjoy those a lot.”
“We are so proud of our products, we’ve always been very proud of the quality and the manufacturing and everything the products stand for, and what they really add to people’s homes and lives and families.”
After taking some quieter moments this summer to enjoy personal time together — Haller LaSala primarily lives in Charleston, South Carolina, while Livada lives in the Boston area — and the early arrival of Livada’s beautiful new baby girl named Ella, the mother-daughter business partners are ready to face New England’s cooler temperatures once more.
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