Co-founding one of London's first upcycled fashion brands

Back in the early 2000s, Jess Sherlock and I had both noticed the same thing. Too much good clothing was ending up in landfill or being shipped overseas, and the ethical fashion brands that existed weren't making the alternative options feel aspirational. We wanted to build something that did. In 2006 we were awarded an UnLtd Millennium Award, funding for social enterprises, which gave us the resource to take the idea from conversation into a proper business.

When we started, the UK was already discarding an estimated 350,000 tonnes of clothing every year. By 2024 that figure had grown to 711,000 tonnes discarded in household bins alone, and the UK now consumes more clothes per head than any other country in Europe. The problem we were trying to solve has got much worse, not better.

We started with market research, running focus groups with thirty women to understand what they thought about upcycled clothing, what they would buy and what they would spend. The research confirmed that demand for ethical products was already significant and growing fast, but the market wasn't yet offering something that felt genuinely desirable. There was a clear gap between what consumers said they wanted and what really existed. That gap helped to shape the brief.

Amoosi was conceived as a high-end ready-to-wear label for professional working women looking for something different, made from good quality discarded fabrics including vintage wool, silk, knitted velvet, leather offcuts from sofa production and old leather jackets that would otherwise have gone to landfill. Classic shapes with edge, made to last.

Alongside the clothing we developed a range of accessories made from leather offcuts, bags that became some of our most sought-after pieces and would later catch the attention of Topshop buyers.

The ambition was to show that ethical fashion could be desirable on its own terms, not something you chose instead of something beautiful, but something you chose because it was.

Partnerships were established quickly with four talented designers who created each collection, while I developed the brand positioning and worked with agency Dogstar Design on the visual identity, creating something that looked and felt like a genuine fashion label rather than a social enterprise. The photographic direction was central to that, imagery that led with the quality and desirability of the pieces rather than their ethical provenance.

This was all happening before social media had really taken off and our brand awareness was built entirely through press, events, word of mouth and the quality of the work itself.

Three seasonal collections were produced with Crossbow, a family-run manufacturer in Stratford, east London, who shared our values.

Within two years Amoosi had stockists in Covent Garden, Terra Plana, an ethical shoe shop who loved our bags, and Koh Samui, a high-end boutique selling top fashion labels. We showed at London Fashion Week and exhibited at the London Borough of Camden Green Fair, which attracted around 20,000 visitors and brought us alongside other leading ethical brands including People Tree and Howies. We ran live design briefs with fashion colleges in London and Nottingham, and gave talks at the London College of Fashion as part of Dilys Williams' Green is the New Black series.

Our board supporters included sustainable fashion pioneer Lucy Siegle, Ghalahad Clark and Lupe Castro, people who understood what we were building and brought genuine credibility to the project.

Topshop's buyers approached us at an event, loved the leather bags and invited us to discuss stocking three hundred pieces in their Oxford Circus flagship, one of the busiest stores in the UK. It was a significant moment, and it brought us face to face with the challenge that would define the limits of what we could do at that stage. Producing replenishable stock at that scale required capital and resource we didn't yet have.

Within four years Amoosi had won Entrepreneur of the Year at the Striding Out Awards, shown at London Fashion Week, sold three seasonal collections through London boutiques and run design collaborations with fashion colleges in London and Nottingham. Topshop buyers asked to stock three hundred of our leather bags in their Oxford Circus flagship. Towards the end we had begun conversations with Aquascutum about a deadstock fabric partnership, using offcuts from their iconic raincoats and trench coats to create a collaborative capsule collection. It was exactly the direction we wanted to take the brand in.

In 2008 two of our stockists went into liquidation during the financial crisis, taking thousands of pounds of stock with them. For a small brand operating without significant backing, absorbing that kind of loss wasn't possible, and like many independent businesses at that time, it lead to the company closing in 2010.

The economics of ethical fashion remain genuinely hard. The deeper challenge isn't just convincing people to buy less and buy better, it's making sustainable options accessible to everyone, not just those with the disposable income to absorb the real cost of making things carefully. People didn't stop using plastic bags at supermarket checkouts because their attitudes changed. They stopped because they had to pay 5p per bag. Sustainable fashion may need the same kind of incentive or nudge, because the evidence suggests that without it, good intentions alone won't be enough to shift behaviour at scale to reduce the impact of fast fashion on people and places.