Orzel is 5 years old today.
I've had a look back at our journey, which has been lovely.
On a trip to New York in 2018, we stumbled across a great little store called Corridor in Brooklyn, and had the best time in there, trying on their amazing shirts, admiring the beautiful store and getting some recommendations on places to go - I really enjoyed it and thought that I'd like to do that one day.
We spoke about it and even came up with the name, after Claire suggested we name the brand after my great aunt and uncle, whose house we live in now.
It then sort of ruminated for a year until 2nd January 2020 when I started messing about with logos. Two days later my mate Mehdi nailed the logo, and it's at this point of the story, that I start to go tonto.
I booked myself into a hostel and headed to Paris. Bear in mind I have never even worked one shift in a clothes shop at this point...
Managing to talk my way into Welcome Edition and Man, I met Dan from Corridor, who asked who my customer was and I didn’t know. He said “Your customer is you. Pick stuff you like and you’ll find people like you” and I genuinely think about this in everything that I do with the store.
I pick my brands and make my orders. 6th February 2020 the company is created. Shit this is real.
The first stock arrived in February 2020, and my first customer is unbelievably Roddy MacNeill, who buys a lovely pair of socks. He pops up again throughout this story!
March 2020 hits, and well, I’ve just committed all my money and eh, the world is completely locked down. We don’t have any stock aside from socks and we don’t have a website. So what do we do? We do Love Lockdown live streams, where our talented mates play live sets for us on apps like Houseparty.
Due to the closure of factories and the fact we aren't live with our website yet, our orders are delayed and the stock doesn’t arrive till November 2020….
When it does arrive, with the help of Ross and Luke from Finnieston Clothing and the talented Alex James on camera, we had our first photoshoot wih David at the space that is now Outlier, and the website launched 22nd November 2020.
We had our first pop up at Nicholl's in Thornwood on 19th and 20th December with art exhibited by Roddy MacNeill. Him again. Been there since the start of the journey. Pop up went really well.
I started thinking about how I could make this work with a physical space, so on the 18th February 2021 I was messing about on Canva and picked a store to add our logos onto to see how it would look. I needed something that fitted the aesthetic of what I wanted the brand to be, so I decided to design it on one of my favourite stores in Glasgow - 678 Dumbarton Road……….
The opportunity then arose to do a 3 month pop up at 21 Dowanhill Street, Jennifer Kent’s beautiful store, right opposite The Sparkle Horse. On 23rd April 2021 we went to see 21 Dowanhill Street and Orzel opened on 3rd June. That was quite frankly the best summer of my life. Many lessons were learned, friendships made and looking back, not that many clothes sold! We closed up at end of August, with a clear goal to get a store.
My dear friend Allan Lewis, who’s no longer with us, kept us going with photo shoots in between pop ups. His positivity is something I still lean on now. Even in his darkest days at the end he was always encouraging, positive and thinking of others.
Then the incredible happens. We purchase a store. And not just any store, it's 678 Dumbarton Road, the store that one year before I had shoddily cut and pasted our logo onto. We get the keys in March 2022, and it needs a complete refit. But like the impeccable timing that has followed us the whole of this journey, we fell pregnant with our daughter just a month later. Nevertheless, we opened our doors on 20th May 2022 and then suddenly here we are...
There are so many people to thank for helping us get to this point, including Claire, who I'm sure would have preferred a house extension, my parents for all their support, and store refit skills, Roddy, who has literally been there since day one, Rachael, Scott, the brands for their great product and everyone who has visited, ordered, taken photos and helped me live out this mad dream. I certainly couldn't have done it without our employee of the month, every month, Ruby.
Hopefully this is us just getting started, we have so many good things planned for this year, including parties, collabs, new brands and more - so thank you and here's to the next five years (fingers crossed).