She also featured as a guest vocalist on 3 The Hard Way’s single ‘Many Rivers’, their follow-up to their big hit ‘Hiphop Holiday’. She toured Australia with them in 1994.

Colony split up and she stayed on with the label, releasing her debut solo single ‘Never’ in 1995. She won the Most Promising Female Vocalist award at the NZ Music Awards that same year.

Sulata followed up with her next single, ‘Mancini’, in 1996, and her debut album Kia Koe ("For You" in Tokelauan) came out in 1997, when she was 20. Sulata co-produced the album with Simon Holloway, who also co-wrote many of the songs with her. Players on the album include Dan Sperber (The New Loungehead), Nathan Haines, Luke Casey, Rob Salmon, and Steve Harrop.

Her focus on promoting the album was sidetracked somewhat by the birth of her son around the same time, and live work to promote the album was set aside.

After parting ways with Deepgrooves (the label folded the year after her debut album came out), Sulata joined her cousin Opetaia Foa'i’s band Te Vaka in the late 1990s (she first started playing with them in the mid-1990s), touring with them overseas for a number of years through to the mid-2000s. She was nominated for Top Female Vocalist in 1996, 1998 and 1999 at the New Zealand Music Awards.

Sulata features on Te Vaka's soundtrack to Moana, one of the biggest selling albums in the world in 2016/17.