Throughout 2017, while living in Hong Kong, I became aware of lots of new small brands, mostly American, that were emerging at the time and began following in them closely.  It felt to me that they were ushering in a shift in culture that was very welcome to me.  I also knew that not much on those lines was taking place in the UK at time and in 2018 I decided that when I move back to the UK I’d like to start a store in London, stocking some of these brands.  I set about trying to figure out how I’d go about doing that and, for better or worse, decided that it was a huge risk and would require more financial backing than I had access to or knew how to get hold of.

A more realistic move for me it seemed was to start my own small clothing brand based in the UK, making the kinds of things I wished to import from others.  So at the end of 2018 I started Soapland.  The premise of the brand was to encapsulate the dearest era of my life, which was being about 10-13 years old, and around the turn of the millennium.  For me the magic of this time was the combination of being a juvenile adolescent terror, and the fact that popular culture at the time for adults was, in retrospect, so hysterically immature and so really captured the imagination of myself and my friends.  I’m talking about Slim Shady, Jackass, Wrestling, Limp Bizkit, South Park, Ali G, Bo Selecta, the Scray Movie franchise, Nuts and Zoo magazines, Euro Trash etc. It was all slapstick violence, comic eroticism, beer, profanity, boobs, dicks, bums and drugs references. 

In the 20 years since, we’ve come a long way in our understanding of how the way these topics are presented affects young minds and how those affected young minds grow up to affect the lives of others, but with this modern clarity it's kind of hilarious that we all grew up that way and the themes used throughout Soapland graphics are born of that.

In running Soapland, I designed the logo, each and every graphic, taught myself to screen print and heat transfer rhinestones, learnt some basics of sewing and pattern cutting, found and communicated with various manufacturers in various different countries, innovated completely new screen printing and embroidery uses, built a website and ran the social media and attempted to run the business side of it.

All this taught me so much, but was ultimately too much to take on alone, and became regretfully unsustainable for me alongside working too but I’m very proud of the output and I'd love to build on this experience, conceiving of ideas, designing and organising production for a more established company.