Mindfully Made

Starting a Home-Grown Ethical Fashion Brand.

Designer and Creative Director, Faye Anna Rochford, takes us through the creative process of starting her label FéRí and discusses why resourceful design is so important to her.

Turn the pages of any Irish fashion and lifestyle magazine and you’re likely to stumble across the new and mindfully made Irish label FéRí .

Recently launched in in March 2020, FéRí embodies modern nostalgia mixed with retro inspired silhouettes and hand-painted prints. The label also prides itself on it’s resourceful use of materials . A favorite with celebrities Laura Whitmore and Amy Huberman, there is already a huge buzz around this brand.

Faye Anna Rochford, Design Director of FéRí , kick-started her career interning for the infamous Diane Von Furstenburg in New York. Faye soon started working her way up the corporate fashion ladder, designing for internationally recognized brands including Primark (in Dublin) and Free People in Philadelphia, USA.

After 3 years at Free People Faye eventually returned to Ireland with her husband Patsy in preparation for the birth of their son, and her new label FéRí .

Faye, we love everything about FéRí, from its conscious ethos to its feminine prints, how did your idea for the brand come about?

It’s really been growing and evolving ever since I started designing. I never had a definite idea of how it would look but I’ve always known that I wanted to have my own label. I wanted to have full creative freedom over what I designed.

Having spent three and a half years in Philadelphia, I moved back to a rural part of Ireland. I was also pregnant and felt like this was the perfect time to explore the idea of starting my own brand. I spent a long time researching how to start a business, I even took a ‘start your own business course’ for a few weeks. My next step was trying to find manufacturers that were able to do what I wanted. That was the most difficult part. I was never worried about designing the collection itself as it was an amalgamation of ideas I had been thinking about for years.

What was your inspiration for your label’s overall aesthetic and first collection?

I’ve always been a collector of vintage clothes, prints and textiles and was inspired by wallpaper prints and oil paintings that I had gathered. I’ve also consistently loved the 70s and 80s in terms of their silhouettes. This eclectic mix was really the source of my inspiration for FéRí, there was never one direct influence. In the first collection everything came together really naturally from everything I had been collecting over the years.

Tell us more about the process of creating FéRí?

I left Free People in July 2018, knowing that I wanted to set up my own brand at some point. I launched in March 2020 so it was really over the course of over a year and a half that FéRí was created. Although during that time I had my baby and we moved house so it was more like 1 year of dedicated focussed time on the creation of the brand.

When I was 8-9 months pregnant I had such a sense of needing to get everything in place in my design studio before the baby arrived. I had a decent sized bump by that time, trying to carry all my Vogue magazines and equipment over to my studio to get it set up. I was really heavily ‘nesting’ as they say.

After sampling with a few different manufacturers in Bali and India, I was able to figure out where I was able to manufacture the collection. I was really learning as I went along. Even when receiving print strike offs, fabric swatches and approving colors - these were all part of my day to day when working for other companies. However being fully responsible for these elements and the fit of the garments taught me a lot. The process was slow because I had a newborn baby but I’m glad it worked out like that. It meant I wasn’t rushing into anything or making the wrong decisions. It also allowed me the time that if I did make any mistakes, it wasn’t a big deal and I could learn from them and move forward.

“Working at these companies also made me realize I wanted to have more responsibility across the collection which you can only really achieve when you have your own company.”

You previously worked at internationally recognized brands Free People and Primark, how did that experience help when starting your own label?

Primark taught me a lot about trend forecasting as that’s the way we worked there. It also taught me about the amount of influence you can have on a huge market based on small ideas and the reach that it has.

Free People really suited me in the way that I designed. I loved the way they worked and how experimental it was. I was able to mock up samples with vintage textiles and fabrics before I would even sketch anything.

Since I am a resourceful designer and love taking apart existing garments to create something new, this really aligned with my way of working. I really liked that organic process and it gave me the confidence knowing that way of designing actually did work. My love for print, pattern and textiles was also really nurtured during my time there.

Working at these companies also made me realize I wanted to have more responsibility across the collection which you can only really achieve when you have your own company. You have full creative control and it’s an amazing feeling. It’s even better when you are also getting such a positive response, confirming you always knew what you were doing.

Tell us more about FéRí's ethical and sustainable practices and why they're so important to you: 

I’ve always been very mindful of resources in general. It’s the way I’ve been brought up. My family was always into second hand pieces - repurposed furniture, antiques etc. We love reusing things and we appreciate and value good quality, which we don’t like going to waste. Even when buying clothes, I was never into buying new trends too much. I prefer wearing something that is a little different and has a story behind it. 

When I decided to start my own brand it was a natural progression to have a mindful and resourceful collection. My initial plan was to make everything in Ireland, but I was challenged by limitations with manufacturing capability and fabric availability. I was disappointed but willing to explore manufacturing some of the collection in Ireland and some in India. 

I purposefully chose to create small collections with pieces that people would have in their wardrobes for a very long time and pass on to others. And eventually would be able to decompose and not end up in landfill. So I only use organic cotton, Irish linen and silk. 

My styles that are made in Ireland use dead stock vintage fabrics with minimal waste, so each piece is then a limited edition garment with a story behind it. I also wanted to use the term ‘mindfully made’ instead of ‘sustainable’. I feel like sustainability has become too much of a buzzword these days. 

All the packaging is biodegradable and recyclable. The packaging is really good quality - my hope is that the customer reuses it. 

“It was also really important to me to produce ethically and sustainably without compromising the design and being too basic as that’s not my aesthetic.”

In your opinion, how can Fashion Retailers help to turn things around to become more ethically and ecologically responsible? 

I think the bigger brands have a huge responsibility to change their ways. A lot of brands do small eco ranges while also producing huge fast fashion collections at the same time. This isn’t enough to cancel out their negative impact. They’re big brands with a lot of connections, for them it’s not that hard to do. 

Launching your own label isn't always easy, what are the biggest challenges you've faced so far? 

One of the biggest challenges was finding a factory that would manufacture to the quality that I wanted with the right fabrics. As a small brand, trying to find factories with the right certificates isn’t easy, and there are always minimums issues. I wanted to visit the factories myself too. It didn’t feel right producing these garments with people I had never met and in a factory I had never been to. It was also really important to me to produce ethically and sustainably without compromising the design and being too basic as that’s not my aesthetic. 

Getting the brand out there and making it known is no easy feat too. The night of launching the collection I was just sitting there waiting for someone to buy something. I turned around to my husband and was like ‘Shit, no one is buying anything!’ And he responded ‘Well Faye, nobody knows about it’. So I had to go through that process of realizing it takes time and hard work getting your brand out there in front of peoples faces. 

It also takes up a lot of your time. You're responsible for every aspect of it. It could be Sunday evening - me and my husband might be sitting down to watch a movie before we go to bed and then I get a message from a customer with a request and I need to deal with it more or less immediately. Because it’s just me running this brand, you have to be everything and everyone at the beginning. It can really impact your personal life. As you grow you can eventually hire other people to take over some of those roles but initially it’s just you and you obviously want to keep everyone happy. A bad week of low sales or negative feedback can really affect you, but at the same time the highs are amazing when you have complete ownership. 

Another challenge is funding. My business is completely self funded through my savings. My goal is to make enough from the first collection to fund the next collection. 

FéRí has already been featured in a lot of magazines and worn by celebs, has the amount of attention you've received in such a short space of time surprised you? 

Yes that has really surprised me! But I think there has been a real shift in the way people are thinking about fashion and what they are buying and who is behind the brand. With the pandemic people were at home more and in a good position to shop online. 

What are your long term goals for Férí? 

I don’t really have any long term goals at the moment, I’m kinda just going with it! Hopefully this time next year we’ll be doing really well but I’m also aware there’s a possibility the market may be in a tough place. I’ve always had that attitude of just ‘playing it by ear’ throughout my life and career. I’m not really a planner, I’m more of a ‘see how it goes’ type of person. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs wanting to start their own label? 

One thing I have learned is - I was always waiting for someone to tell me ‘now you’re ready to start your own line, you have enough experience and are qualified to do it’. But it doesn't work like that. 

With FéRí, it just dawned on me, I had nothing to lose (apart from my investment). If I had kept waiting for someone to say those words to me, I would have waited my entire life. I thought I had to keep getting more experience but in reality, I knew how to design, talk to people, approve a sample and fit a product. Building a website amongst other things would be hard, but I knew I would be able to get help. I was very aware it might not work out but at least I would have tried. 

None of our garments are going to waste either, if we have any inventory left over each season, we will still be selling them the following year, we will not be throwing anything away.

Thank you Faye!

To check out the beautiful collection at FeRi and find out more about the brand’s story head over to their website.

You can also follow them on instagram

By Emma Golley