Yorkshire's Loft and Daughter is Making Sure Your Wardrobe is Summer Ready
From the jewellery you need now to how to make a splash by the pool, Loft and Daughter has it all
The first thing you need to know about Loft & Daughter, is that it’s uncompromisingly ethical. Katie has a deeper insight than most into the cost of doing otherwise: before she started the brand, she had been working as a fashion buyer for a huge fast fashion retailer based in Sydney. ‘Most of it was coming from China and some from India,’ she says. ‘I had to negotiate really, really tight cost prices to get these massive margins. The aim was to sell them fast, sell them cheap, sell them at a discount.
‘I knew that something wasn’t adding up,’ she continues. ‘The cost of workmanship and fabric and what we were paying didn’t sit right with me. [Neither did] the speed at which it was expected, and then the fines and the penalties that were given when those expectations weren’t met,’ she says.‘It was the dark side of fashion that I was exposed to. That gave me the drive to do what I’m doing now – do things my own way and do things the right way.’
Disillusioned, she left her job in fast fashion and she and her fiancé (now husband) spent a year travelling before relocating to Yorkshire to be nearer to Katie’s family. It was during a stretch of travelling and volunteering in India that Katie had the idea of starting her own womenswear brand. She returned on a mission.
‘I travelled the width and breadth of India searching for people that I felt could really bring the brand to life,’ she says. ‘Out of all those meetings I came away with two cooperatives.’
The first were a group of silversmiths. ‘They’re passionate about social uplift and welfare and preserving traditional handicraft techniques, and they happened to be in jewellery,’ Katie says. She was determined to work with them, and so she pivoted from her original dream of womenswear and decided to concentrate on jewellery. ‘The brand really started with the people and the product is secondary to the people,’ she says.
The second was a women’s cooperative. ‘They’re a group of block printers,’ Katie says. ‘When I first met them they were a lot more basic, but I just loved what they were about. They were up-skilling really disadvantaged women in the community in kantha stitching and block printing – giving them another lifeline. I knew that I needed to work with them in whatever capacity I could, and that’s how our jewellery pouches came about.
‘We started off with very simple, basic pouches, but now they’re more beautiful and the print’s a lot more intricate. We now do a whole range of block prints: picnic blankets and I’m just about to launch yoga bags and sun bags and weekend bags and wash bags. They’ve grown with me, which has been lovely to see.’
Since then, Katie has been designing her collections of recycled silver and gold vermeil jewellery from her home in Yorkshire. The brand’s signature are necklaces, bracelets and earrings, rings and anklets adorned with amulets of Hindu gods and goddesses. ‘A lot of my designs are inspired by antique Indian amulets,’ Katie explains. ‘We are very inspired by amulets that are already in existence, but we don’t replicate them. We’ll take, for example, the image of a goddess from an old amulet or an old Indian coin and then we’ll tweak it and make it our own and turn it into one of our pendants.
‘The most popular pieces are pieces that people really resonate with because of a deeper connection or a deeper meaning behind a certain goddess [or] god,’ she continues. ‘Rather than me thinking of a design, I’ll think of a meaning that I want to invoke. My upcoming collection is based on hope and peace and these ideas will then direct the designs. Last year’s collection was more about manifestation, and affirmations, so we have rings which will say “I am fearless and grateful and loved”.
‘The designs really start with a feeling and expand from there,’ she concludes. ‘When something has meaning then it’s timeless, if something is more trend-driven then it’s got a short shelflife and it’s not really aligned with Loft & Daughter’s values.’
Two years ago, Katie met a group of women that reignited her original dream of a clothing label. Saheli Women are an all-female social enterprise in rural Rajasthan that, among other things, help disadvantaged women attain economic independence by teaching them traditional crafts and garment construction. They now create Loft & Daughter’s range of resort wear, including kimonos and co-ords, from second-hand saris sourced form across India and hand-picked by Katie. ‘They’re all one of a kind,’ Katie explains. ‘I pick the prints and then the ladies put the different colour combinations together and stitch them in a way that is unique to them.’ This summer the brand will be debuting a new range of 100 percent silk kimonos, made with fabric that has been dyed with real flowers to create unique floral prints.
Katie commits a minimum of one percent of Loft & Daughter’s annual profits to environmental causes through One Percent for the Planet, and at least the same amount to social causes (she tells me that the overall percentage is usually closer to three). In a similar vein, one thing that Katie is particularly proud of is Loft & Daughter’s B Corp certification. ‘It was an application that I had on my desktop for three years because it was just a lot of work,’ she says, but it was a milestone that she was determined to reach.
‘There’s so much greenwashing out there,’ she explains. ‘Everyone is ethical, everyone is sustainable … there are all these buzzwords, [but] what does it actually mean? I wanted to prove that I’m doing what I’m saying I’m doing.’
