My first real, structured, business venture, a clothing brand when I was 17.
I clearly had a lot of free time around this period, working on my A-Levels wasn’t doing it for me and so I decided to launch a clothing brand off of my existing brand ‘MINIMXL’ (more on this coming soon). But this was my first time spinning up a new brand from very little existing source material, perhaps the single ‘MINIMXL’ logo was the only artifact, and it was hard.
At this point in my life I had just moved to a new school, I was slowly saying goodbye to the ever-present teenage angst and beginning to feel more like a real, functioning member of society. This inspired the theme of this initial drop, BLOSSOM — the act of developing in a promising or healthy way.
Building this brand was a solo endeavour, which meant that I spent the next few months utilising my limited ability to travel (I lived in the sticks and couldn’t drive) to go on photo walks, document writing, interrogate / interview my friends around my theme. I wanted to create something which would feel timeless to wear, was quality, and made the wearer feel comfortable in themselves.
Honestly? I feel like this design managed to do that — this hoodie remains a key staple in my wardrobe to this day, and judging by the handful of customers I still speak with, I’m not the only one. It’s weird writing about this project some 8 years later, because there are so many things I’d do differently - but the one thing I maintain (which I rarely feel about my previous work) is that the hoodie design remains timeless and pretty sweet. I think I was able to capture how I felt at the time, the feeling of just beginning to blossom into the person I wanted to be, weirdly I think I felt more secure in myself back then than now.
As part of this project, I carried out a photoshoot, went through multiple sample reviews of the product, created marketing campaigns, got labels & patches made, it was a lot of fun.
I’ll end with one of my favourite stories around this project. I was wearing this hoodie while working a graveyard shelf stocking shift at Sainsburys in 2022, I was new to the job (hence wearing a hoodie and not mandated uniform). A colleague (who I hadn’t yet met) walked up to me and asked where I’d got the hoodie from, because she really liked it. I explained it was my brand. She took a second look at it, and told me she’d seen someone wearing it before! She pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of her at a party in Leeds stood next to someone wearing my hoodie! It was a crazy feeling, one that spurred something inside me and gave me a taste for making things people love.
