One of the things I absolutely love about owning my blogs is when I stumble across great new designers. I always friend them, talk to them and find out a little about them, and encourage them as much as I can because, let's face it, it's a very competitive industry and the new ones need all the help they can get.

So, today I'm standing at a well-known designer's store picking up a Mother's Day freebie, when I see this very nicely dressed woman standing nearby. I zoom in a little closer and it was like...WOW...that's a great outfit! I inspect it and find that she's the designer, so I immediately ask her for her landmark. We start chatting and it turns out that she's only learned to design in October of 2008, and opened her store, Ranena Olivier Couture (R.O.C.) in December, 2008. She mentioned she has a freebie, so I hop over there to get it for Virtual Freebies and stopped dead in my tracks, as I looked around at all the mouth-watering and budget breaking wonderfulness.

I'm not going to lie to you - the prices here are fairly steep for a newish designer, but the casual clothes are quite reasonable. I didn't purchase a gown but prices are around $L800 and up (but I suspect they're worth it, given the outfit I saw her wearing), while the casual clothes are around $L225 and up for a complete outfit.

Ranena uses beautiful textures in her designs as you'll see below. In our conversation, she stressed that she loves for clothing to fit right too, so you shouldn't have to do much editing (I did none, btw...everything fit perfectly). She also mentioned that a gown she submitted for the Maseno Project auction sold for $L10,000!

The dress is called Krisha and sells for $L350.

The outfit below is called Narnia, and sells for $L225.

I encourage you to stop by Ranena Olivier Couture and see what wonderfulness catches your eye!