(Originally published on the UMd.studio Journal, 5th May 2016)
Accessories brand Alice Made This is a marriage of industrial manufacture and cool, clean design, with every piece expertly crafted in Britain. We met Alice and Ed Walsh in their studio, nestled away at the bottom of the garden of their South-East London home.
Alice's background is in furniture and product design, having worked with brands including Tom Dixon, Conran and Ilse Crawford. At the heart of Alice Made This - and underlying everything Alice does - is a real passion for processes and industry.
A: I love visiting factories to get inspired. I currently have a list of around thirty that work with processes that I find interesting. I literally won’t put pen to paper until I've gone out and seen the factories, and the materials and processes they work with. You need to know how a machine works before you can design something that’s efficient or correct to the way that it's produced.
When you hear the words 'factory' and 'manufactured', there's a tendency to imagine a product that's been quickly or cheaply made, but that's far from always the case. There's often an incredible amount of honed craft and skill involved, not to mention experience.
A: Our Nanotechnology collection uses an electrodeposition process, a plating process used within the electronics industry. Everything has to be hand-polished before being being wired onto a matrix by a seventy year old lady who's been doing it for thirty years. If it's done well, it plates consistently and beautifully. If it's not done so well, you get quality control issues. I love to use other people’s experience - people who’ve been honing their skill for twenty years, doing one task on one machine. They know it better than anyone but probably see it through the narrow tunnel of that task, so I ask them, ‘Could you do this? Can you do that?’. I try to make them think outside of the box in terms of what we’re producing whilst taking inspiration from their production methods, their history, techniques and the materials they work with.
This collaborative way of creating is illustrated by the way Alice Made This worked with Birmingham factory Firmin and Sons, who produce ornate regalia for the British Military.
A: We wanted to do something that was true to our own aesthetic, but also to their process and materials. They make buttons, so we took their button shank and formed a cufflink. Inspired by the fact that they were catering for the military industry, we pared it back. We looked at old cartography iconography and took our shapes and patterns from that.
Which brings us nicely back to the very inception of Alice Made This - cufflinks. Over to Ed.
E: When Alice and I got married in 2010 we wanted to gift the groomsmen cufflinks. I had a certain style and colour in mind, but we couldn’t find anything. There were all these pint glasses and dice, but nothing that we liked. And that’s where the idea sprung from.
A: We started to explore the market and realised that no-one had done anything fresh with cufflinks and so, as an introduction as a brand, it gave us a platform to make a point of difference, and it gave us a niche to talk about, so we managed to access retailers and press attention quite quickly because it was quite a focused and different proposition.
The point of difference worked. On the launch of the website in 2012, they sent six pairs of cufflinks to key industry influencers, one of whom was Jeremy Langmead, the then Editor-in-chief at Mr Porter. By the next day, they'd signed a three-month exclusive contract with the luxury fashion e-tailer.
Alice Made This was still very much an extra-curricular pursuit at this time, with Alice working full-time at Conran. But whilst she was on maternity leave after the birth of her first son, things began to happen. Alice Made This were invited by the British Fashion Council to become part of Men's Fashion Week, which was just starting in London, and caught the attention of key retailers, including Liberty and Japanese brands United Arrows and Beams. Alice made the decision not to go back to work full-time and worked as a consultant three days a week, working on Alice Made This two days a week from the shed. Ed officially joined the business in 2014.
A: I realised I needed a business partner. I went for coffee with a mate and he said 'Why don't you just ask your husband? You just told me your job spec and Ed fills the bill to a T!' So I asked him that evening. The two things that really make it work is that we both have the same goals and that we're working on totally different parts of the business so we're not stepping on each other's toes. I work on design development and overall brand strategy and Ed looks after sales, logistics - all the business, back of house stuff that any creative hates. Everything I wanted to hand over, he wanted to do!
E: I worked in the city for eight years, on the trading floor with 250 guys - very different to Alice Made This. It was hard at first - I was used to everything being laid on a plate for me, down to breakfast, and then all of a sudden it was, 'Where's my payslip? Oh, that's me, I have to pay myself!' It's been a great learning curve. I've always had a creative side - I studied History of Art at university so I've always had an interest in the aesthetic side of fashion.
So what's next for Alice Made This?
A: We're about to launch a full women's collection. We launched a capsule collection before Christmas to see what the reception was, and it went down really well so we decided to go with a full collection. As a team, we all wear accessories in quite a similar way - we don't litter ourselves with accessories but choose something that makes a statement.
The Alice Made This women's range launches in June however you can shop the rest of the collection online now.
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Photography: Sasha Zyryaev