October 21, 2018
Buy Better Buy Less
A story about us.
We live in difficult times, and as shopkeepers, environmentalists, mothers, employers, grandmothers….There is a constant conundrum in our business heads. We need to make new things to sell in order to survive. We absolutely don’t want to contribute to landfill. We want to look beautiful and to keep our customers looking beautiful too. We want our lovely factory to keep employing their expert sewers and cutters, to pay their rents and their council taxes. We want to keep paying our rent, to the lovely Marsden Hospital up the road in Sydney Street, as well as our enormous council tax bill to Kensington & Chelsea. We want to print beautiful fabrics on the finest washed linen to furnish your houses and cover your sofas.
We source the finest fabrics, and print lovely roses onto velvet, and make them into clothes that are Extraordinary, Beautiful and very, very different. Happily, we see many pieces of Cabbages & Roses clothing on strangers in the street, they always stand out. Often we are stopped and asked where we found our beautiful clothes. Cabbages & Roses clothes are still being worn 18 years after they were made. This, I think, is because our clothes last a very long time and really very special. They are passed between the generations, are sold on E-bay sometimes for more than we sold them for originally, and they are worn and worn and worn.
And, most importantly, they still look lovely 18 years later. Rosie Velvet is our newest print, taken from an old vintage document found in a junk shop in Scotland, and transferred digitally onto our lovely cotton velvet. Happily, digital printing uses less water than conventional printing and has less wastage in dye runoff which – even though when we do hand print, we always use Oeko tex approved inks – must be a good thing.
Our Rosie Velvet has been made into extraordinary coats, jackets, trousers, frocks…..totally unique. Clothes to share, to show off in, to celebrate in, to make life extraordinary in. Because we are small, our orders are small. But our statement is BIG. Although our clothes are more expensive than high street stores, how many items of clothing are in your wardrobe 18 years after
they were bought? It is impossible not to have some impact on the environment, but we say buy better, buy less, and really really love what you buy.