Tweedy Clothing began life down under in a garage in Sydney’s Northern beaches. Josh and I met whilst travelling in New Zealand and had moved to Sydney together. We both worked 8-hour days, and I did a yoga teacher training course most weekends. Whilst doing my teacher training, I was inspired to start making healing gemstone Mala’s, just for myself. The girls on my course loved them and all wanted one. This gave me the idea that I could start to sell them. Josh turned the garage into a workspace and we started making jewellery most evenings. Josh was inspired by this and decided that he wanted to start up-cycling tweed (this is where the name comes from) jackets, sewing patches and buttons onto them, which we started selling at local markets.

Josh and I are not people who can keep still, we had been in Sydney for nearly 2 years. I was missing my family in the UK and we were getting itchy feet. Josh said to me one day – “why don’t you apply for the Christmas market in the UK and we can move there for a while and sell the jewellery”. I applied and we got in! So off we went, left our jobs, packed our bags and decided to see where creating our dreams could take us. Christmas was a HUGE success; people loved our stuff and we loved doing it! We both felt we wanted to move more into clothing, as we couldn’t find ethical fashion that we liked anywhere, at a reasonable price. So we decided to go to India and find a partner to create the designs in our head.

We travelled India for 5 months trying to find the right person, who had the same values as us. We couldn’t find them and we were about to give up when we came across a tiny shop in the Himalayan mountains. The fabric felt amazing and the man selling the items was genuinely lovely. He explained that the head tailor was in a small village in Rajasthan. So, we hopped on our motorbike and went to see him. We knew straight away that this was it! We met Raj. At the time he had four of his family working for him, all highly skilled tailors and also a master cutter, in a very small “factory”. He only did a few small orders and made money mainly from his shops, but he explained how he wanted to move into making larger quantities of products for one company. This was perfect for us, the bond was formed! We spent a lot of time going through the ideas in our head and discussing our ethos. We had lunch at his village and met his family and the family of the tailors that now sew your garments. They were all happy and loved going to work, so we knew this was the perfect match. The universe had aligned!

We travelled back to Australia with our first designs, selling them at local markets and festivals, they went down a storm! Then we decided to apply to the UK festivals and got a whole summer circuit, including some huge events like Isle of Wight Festival, Boardmasters and Camp Bestival. We were lucky to have help from some friends and my sister Lou, so we took the bird on the road, and what a fun summer we had! We quickly learnt a lot of lessons and became super smart at adapting to the very variable English weather! We have memories of our friend Tim hanging from the gazebo on a cliff top in 80mph winds to keep it down 😊

Eight festy seasons in and we are still learning all the time! Our family grew 5 years ago, so we had to accommodate for the ever-growing force of nature which is Niyah. We bought Haroshi-Man (our truck) and adapted him to have living and stock space. We live in the van from April to September, travelling from event to event. Our team grew and we opened our Southsea store, before moving over to Lyndhrst and opening our new shop, The Yew Tree. We have an incredible team of eight wonderful staff and some volunteers, including Caceys mum Gayle. To be honest, we couldn’t have done this without our family and friends, they have helped us out so much, looked after Niyah, put up with crazy deliveries, sent stock out whilst we are abroad, listened to our crazy ideas, worked many a festival season and so much more! So, THANK YOU, we LOVE you!