There are probably easier times in life to start a clothing brand.
Your twenties, perhaps.
Plenty of energy. Fewer responsibilities. Knees that don’t make noises when you stand up.
Instead, I decided that my late forties — with six kids, a dog-walking business, an unhealthy amount of time spent in the gym and a life operating somewhere between maximum capacity and fucking burnout — seemed perfect.
Obviously.
Welcome to The Wandering Manc.
How
It didn’t start with a business plan.
There was no boardroom. No market research department. Nobody presented me with a PowerPoint explaining the exciting growth potential of sarcastic gym clothing.
It started with ideas.
Stupid ideas, mostly.
Things I wanted written on T-shirts. Things I’d say in the gym. Things that made my wife laugh. Things inspired by dogs, people, conversations, bad behaviour and the general absurdity of everyday life.
And eventually I realised I had enough ideas that simply annoying the people around me with them probably wasn’t sufficient anymore.
So I started designing them.
One design became another. Then another.
Then came websites, domains, printers, suppliers, fabrics, print methods, artwork files and the horrifying discovery that apparently running a clothing company involves slightly more than putting something funny on a vest.
By the time I realised this, I was already committed.
Why
Because most clothing is remarkably fucking boring.
Especially gym clothing.
Everything seems incredibly serious.
DISCIPLINE.
DOMINATE.
NO EXCUSES.
Mate, I’m just trying to finish my lateral raises without making eye contact with anyone.
I wanted clothing that actually sounded like the people I know.
People who train hard but can still take the piss out of themselves.
Dog people who know dogs are often preferable to humans.
People with slightly inappropriate senses of humour.
And women who are absolutely fucking sick of being given unsolicited opinions.
I’m married to one.
My wife can barely take a walk with the dogs without some middle-aged twat deciding she’d really benefit from his thoughts on what she’s doing, how she’s handling them, what she should be doing differently, or whatever other bit of wisdom nobody asked him for.
Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
Women being talked over. Corrected. Patronised. Told what to do. Told how to look. Told what they should be comfortable with.
So yes, some of our designs lean feminist.
Not because we sat down and decided it was a clever marketing demographic.
Because it’s funny, it’s real, and frankly some people could do with being told:
“Shush. I didn’t ask.”
I also wanted to make stuff for people who have accumulated enough life experience to stop worrying quite so much about whether everybody approves of them.
That became the idea behind TwM.
Not clothing for everybody.
Clothing for our people.
If somebody looks at one of our designs and thinks, “Who the fuck would wear that?”, that’s completely fine.
Somebody else is looking at exactly the same thing thinking:
“That is absolutely fucking me.”
That’s the person we made it for.
When
Now.
That was probably the biggest part of it.
At some point you realise you’re incredibly good at finding reasons to wait.
When things calm down.
When you’ve got more money.
When you’ve got more time.
When you know exactly what you’re doing.
The problem is, none of those things necessarily happen.
And being in your forties does something useful to your attitude towards all that.
You become increasingly aware that there probably isn’t going to be a magical moment where somebody taps you on the shoulder and announces:
“Congratulations. You are now completely prepared to try that thing you’ve been thinking about.”
So I started.
Am I learning some of it as I go?
Absolutely.
Have mistakes already been made?
Obviously.
Will there be more?
Almost certainly.
But I’d much rather reach 50 having tried to build something interesting than still be talking about the thing I might do one day.
So here we are.
The Wandering Manc.
Born in Manchester. Built somewhere between dog walks, gym sessions, family life and an alarming number of completely inappropriate ideas.
Let’s see where the fuck this goes. 😆