Buy Better Buy Less

A story about us.

We live in difficult times, and as shopkeepers, environmentalists, mothers, employers,

grandmothers….There is a constant conundrum in our business heads. We need to make new things

to sell in order to survive. We absolutely don’t want to contribute to landfill. We want to look

beautiful and to keep our customers looking beautiful too. We want our lovely factory to keep

employing their expert sewers and cutters, to pay their rents and their council taxes. We want to keep

paying our rent, to the lovely Marsden Hospital up the road in Sydney Street, as well as our

enormous council tax bill to Kensington & Chelsea. We want to print beautiful fabrics on the finest

washed linen to furnish your houses and cover your sofas.

We source the finest fabrics, and print lovely roses onto velvet, and make them into clothes that are

Extraordinary, Beautiful and very, very different. Happily, we see many pieces of Cabbages & Roses

clothing on strangers in the street, they always stand out. Often we are stopped and asked where we

found our beautiful clothes. Cabbages & Roses clothes are still being worn 18 years after they were

made. This, I think, is because our clothes last a very long time and really very special. They are

passed between the generations, are sold on E-bay sometimes for more than we sold them for

originally, and they are worn and worn and worn.

And, most importantly, they still look lovely 18 years later.

Rosie Velvet is our newest print, taken from an old vintage document found in a junk shop in

Scotland, and transferred digitally onto our lovely cotton velvet. Happily, digital printing uses less

water than conventional printing and has less wastage in dye runoff which – even though when we do

hand print, we always use Oeko tex approved inks – must be a good thing.

Our Rosie Velvet has been made into extraordinary coats, jackets, trousers, frocks…..

totally unique. Clothes to share, to show off in, to celebrate in, to make life extraordinary in. Because

we are small, our orders are small. But our statement is BIG. Although our clothes are more

expensive than high street stores, how many items of clothing are in your wardrobe 18 years after

they were bought? It is impossible not to have some impact on the environment, but we say buy

better, buy less, and really really love what you buy.

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