SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Menswear Style Podcast. I'm your host, Pete Brooker, and today on the show I am talking to the founder of Costume, Ed Bartlett, winner of multiple awards, including 10 out of 10 and product of the year for its comfort break cycling shorts. Costume is a leader in innovative, responsibly made technical cycling apparel, combining high performance, comfort, and utility with exclusive artist collaborations and obsessive attention to detail. Produced and sourced entirely in Europe by multi-generation family run partners. Costume products are made entirely from premium recycled materials and released in limited edition pre-order batches known as Edits. Okay, well, big fan of Ed's big fan of the brand, and to tell you more about costume is the founder, Ed Barlow.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Sure, thank you. Yeah, thanks for the invite, I appreciate it. Um well, it's a kind of coming together of lots of different things, like personal passions, hobbies, um, opportunities. So, I mean, I guess from my perspective, uh, I'm a I get I don't really like the word, but it's a kind of much abused word. But I've been an entrepreneur for 22, 23 years now. Um, and I've kind of made a career of uh uh doing things I'm passionate about rather than you know the usual career paths that people sometimes sort of blindly go on from school. I wasn't particularly scholarly, I was very creative, and you know, back in those days, there wasn't much room for creativity. Uh I went to art college and mucked about for a couple of years instead of university and uh fell into making computer games. Uh I did that for 15 years at a time where that was an incredibly, I mean it is still very exciting, but it was incredibly exciting. Uh I learned an awful lot there about you know business and so on. Uh and then I went into the art world. Oh no, sorry, no, after that, sorry, I I founded a business. Uh I was the first company to kind of put brands into video games, right? So we got into the stage with um video games where it was so realistic that we were going to brands saying, please can we put your brand in our game to make it look more real? What kind of games were these? Uh these were, you know, PlayStation, you know, Xbox sort of console games, that sort of era. Um, and uh yeah, so long story short, I I'd set up a business and raised a lot of venture capital money. Um, and that was going very well, very successful. And then um, I don't know if you remember the subprime house crisis happened, Lehman Bros went bust, and all the money stopped coming to the market. And uh I sort of at the same time had realized I wasn't actually enjoying what I was doing either. And actually what I was really passionate about was art. And so I'd been sort of getting quite into going to art exhibitions, and it was the early days of like Banksy, like street art in Shoritch, and it was it was a very exciting time. And um, I came up with the idea of being like a band manager, but for I sort of hang around with a lot of people that manage bands and in fashion, uh and it also was very glamorous, it wasn't very glamorous, it was pretty grotty to be honest. Um, but um, yeah, the idea of of sort of being a band manager for artists, essentially. So that's where we'll come onto that later, but that's where the art aspect of costume comes in. And then um I got divorced, decided I want to live in London anymore. I moved to Bristol. I'd been sort of getting more and more into cycling as a sort of hobby, and um uh got quite into long distance riding. So, you know, sometimes 300 kilometres in a day, you know, like 12, 13 hours, sometimes riding overnight. Uh it's um it's a it's a a bit of a niche, but it's a really growing niche, and people are spending more and more time riding longer, longer distances, exploring more. And what happens with that is that you find the limits of your kit very quickly, whether that's your bike, but especially the apparel. And being curious and being an entrepreneur and not really having the fear gene, I sort of started thinking about ways of doing it better. And when you're when you're spending 13 hours on a bike, you you have a lot of time to obsess, and your brain goes into insane amounts of detail. Sometimes it may not be about your apparel, it may be a song lyric that goes over and over in your head for five hours. It's ridiculous. Um, but more often, more often than not, you've got a lot of time for kind of creative thinking, right? So I started uh you know wondering why these brands are so obsessed with like racing and the Tour de France and heritage and why aren't there more people colour riding? Why don't I see more women cycling? Um, why can't I just find a pair of bib shorts that fit me properly, you know? Um, and uh and then COVID happened. And I'd been planning to do the art thing in Bristol actually when I moved here, and of course, then suddenly the artists couldn't exhibit the the world stopped turning, there were no art fairs, no exhibitions, nothing in public. And that for me was a sign, really. It was like uh I'm gonna, while the world has stopped turning, basically, I'm gonna throw myself into this. Um, and that's really where costume came from. And uh obviously this doesn't just happen overnight, right? There's an awful lot of work that goes into creating a brand like this, designing and developing products, putting things to market. So there was a pretty protracted period initially of like ideation and coming up with a business plan and a business model. I guess it's probably worth summing up to kind of what costume is, maybe quickly as well before I get into that.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Please, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

So the concept is it's this is an interesting one, right? Um I'm it's funny, haven't been in the art world where the kind of less is more is the kind of statement, right? Like that's the thing in the art world. I'm not very good at it sometimes. And um, funnily enough, my art shows got quite a lot of um interest because I used to do very intense lighting. I actually worked with a guy that used to like car shows, you know, these big at the NEC and places like that. And we had a very different aesthetic, and people really liked it. You know, sometimes when you come at something from the outside, you do things differently, and people people like that, people get bored of the status quo, and that's kind of what costume is. So it was a case of looking at what works, what has worked historically in cycling, what's the kind of current cutting edge, and what could be new and different. And what we do essentially is we cut out all of the waste. So uh it's funny because uh there's a guy I don't know if you know, do you know Fram Jacket? Uh yeah, I know I Nick um uh yeah, yeah, that's the that's the guy.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah, he yeah, I've had him on the show for yeah, we've been yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

So he he's also a cyclist, right? And uh he saw we had this um incredible 10 out of 10 review in road.cc. We also won product of the year, he was looking for Bib Shorts, he messaged me very kindly on LinkedIn and said, Listen, oh that's great, but your website, you're just trying to say too many things, basically, right? And like it comes down to that thing of like narrow down what it is in one sentence, and I found that really, really hard, and I still find it quite hard. Hence, I've just given you a long rambling monologue instead of just telling you what it is, because it's a lot of things. There's a sustainability angle, there's the art angle, there's the exclusivity and limited editions, there's the incredible fabrics that no one else is using. Um, there's you know, there's there's a lot going on there. What I've kind of settled on is that we make the best possible cycling apparel. So we could just say the best, but a lot of brands say they make the best, and it's very subjective. Uh, obviously, we've got the Road CC review that says also that we're the best, right? And look at our trust pilot, and a lot of our customers say it's the best. For me, it's the best possible. And what that means is other brands cannot compete with our model, essentially. It's so efficient, and we we cut out so much waste in the process from the development standpoint right through to kind of the product at the end of life, the retail side of things, that we have so much margin left to play with that we're able to spend so much more on fabrics, you know, ultimately, technical apparel especially lives and dies by the fabrics. Um, I mean, all fashion does, right? Fashion is fabric ultimately. Um, and and so you can immediately pick up a pair of our bib shorts versus even the high-end competitors, and you can immediately see the difference. I actually just went and did a test. We talked about it briefly before starting the podcast. We went to test the um the chamois pad versus lots of other competitors. And the guy that runs the test place, he's a bike fit guy, so he sees every short on the market, every bike, every saddle he's never actually seen ours in the flesh. And the second he held on to it was like, Oh, okay, right, yeah, this is special. And he actually tried a pair on as well, and and uh he's actually ended up buying a pair, so you know it it really is it's a differentiator. It's um and uh the the the key thing for that is the pre-order model. So you can't just buy our kit on the website. Actually, at the moment you can, but that's a another story that's like early samples and stuff we have made. The idea is that we a bit like Fram jacket and actually also a bit like Painter Jacket, um, we pre-sell everything, and it's a limited edition batch, each batch has an artist attached to it. So, as that brings that kind of exclusivity, um, the creativity, um, because that's also something that's been lacking in cycling. And um we only make what we sell essentially, and so you just have that incredible efficiency of stopping all of that waste before it happens, you know. I think once you when you see what goes into making a product, you know, like we're all wearing clothes, every single hopefully we're all wearing clothes, some of us may not be. Um I'm wearing my top half, but that's uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

We do have the camera on, and yeah, I can't see that you know that's that's that's because we've got the windows open and you're sure, sure, sure. Yeah, just for birthday.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

But I think like when when you when you actually see what goes into it, it's impossible for me to imagine wasting one of our pieces of kit, you know. It's like and yet brands uh most fashion brands, the vast majority of fashion brands, that's the business model. They don't know what they're gonna sell. There's these huge guesses about what they're gonna sell. The the factory minimums are such that you know you're making in some of the extreme ends of the size breaks, you you know you're not gonna sell all of those. And so it's all baked into the model. And and when you then also factor in those extra volumes, the extra shipping, the extra logistics, the warehousing, um, you know, uh the retail side of things, it's just an unbelievable amount of waste that's baked in.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Well, especially as you're a new company and a new brand, right, in this field. And every I I say this all the time everybody who I've ever met has got an idea for a t-shirt, and they think it's the best idea, and they fall in love with the idea, they order thousands and thousands, and then realize, oh, I just spent all that time and money on the idea that I fell in love with and didn't put any time into marketing or thinking how I can sell this or getting an audience engaged, and now all those boxes are sitting in their mum's garage and they'll be there for in perpetuity. So you have like a limit to what you can do just on your own with one idea. What what I wanted to know, Ed, is how did you get your first batch basically off the ground? Who were you approaching in the very early days with regards to the fabrics, with regards to the designs? What were those early steps like for you?

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Well, I was very, very fortunate, and um, you know, there's a lot of serendipity involved, I think, in business. And, you know, I know a lot of other company founders in many different disciplines, and every single one of them will tell you that there's been like real moments of serendipity. And it's that thing of you make your own luck, right? You put yourself out there, there's more chance of that luck happening, right? I don't actually believe in luck, um, but there is the thing of you put yourself out there and there's more chance of those things happening. Uh, I have a friend who I used to ride with back in the day, he was working for Tracksmith, which is like the running Rafa. If I had to sum up in a word, it's you know, I actually think the founder was one of the original, original founders of Rafa. I could be wrong, but anyway, I was talking to him about people that he might know because obviously I have no fashion background at all, right? Like I'm a passionate consumer, I have friends in the industry, I've got better than zero base knowledge because of that, but I don't know how to make a donate to a tech pack, for example. Um, however, it he knew this woman who had been quite early in Rafa and was quite senior there on the kind of technical side of things. And funnily enough, she was just setting up a consultancy to help new small independent brands with a sustainability focus to do their thing. So it was just a freak of timing. Um, you know, she she was the exact right person at the right time, and uh she was willing to work with someone like me who had some crazy ideas and was willing to take big leaps and big big risks, and and um between the two of us, we we did it. And uh yeah, uh I should say who she is, actually Demi Johnson. Um it's always good to give people a name drop. And you know, she was instrumental in sort of tempering some of my crazier ideas and and but also being flexible enough to kind of you know skip some of the processes that larger brands probably would do to kind of um test some concepts. And between the two of us, we you know, we've been able to launch with seven products, uh in male and female, which you know, for a new brand in in the cycling world actually is quite bizarrely, it's quite uh unusual. It's still very male, male-centric. Um, and obviously win all these awards. And uh yeah, I definitely couldn't have done it without her. On the fabric side of things, uh, it's something I've always been quite obsessed with, I think. And basically, I just spent an inordinate amount of hours with fabric samples, um, with a list of of sort of filters, right? So, like it had to be 100% recycled, um, you know, it had to be near shore sourced, etc. So we've ended up with some pretty amazing, you know, Italian, and again, because we've got all of that room in our margin, we can afford these fabrics, right? So our cycling bib um fabric, we're the only brand in cycling using it because it's just so expensive, right? And if you read the the Road CC review, the guy says it's the single best thing I've put next to my skin, you know. So it is a real differentiator. And what's interesting is when you go through all these fabrics back to back and then you stumble upon one, it's like a real Eureka moment, you know. It's uh and then what I do is I don't settle on that, I then use that as my benchmark to find one that's slightly better. And so, yeah, I just spent a huge amount of time stretching fabrics over my knee and window paning it and you know getting it wet and drying it, and and uh yeah, that's that's been the basis of um the whole range, really finding those unique fabrics. And if you again, if you read the the customer reviews as well, that's that's what people really really notice.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Cool. Oh that that's a that's a really good review. And I think we spoke offline about how how important that is for a young brand as well to get a review like that, and how how rare it is, you know, to have someone that high up to give you that that kind of accolade. I want to know a little bit more about the the pre-ordering though. So how many you say you don't ship or you you don't produce until you have all the pre-orders in. So they see the designs, they know what they want, and then you go to then you go to make them. Is there like a ceiling of how many you need to hit, like a mark of how many pre-orders you need to hit before you hit production?

SPEAKER_00 15:00

It's a good question, and and it is actually a differentiator for us because you know that this model relies on a good supply chain, right? And you know, we've because we're able to spend more money on the the manufacturer and partners and the manufacturing, it means that we're able to lower those minimums, you know. So if you were to go to some of the factories our competitors using, the minimums are so high, it just wouldn't work as a business model. So, yes, that flexible supply chain, both our factories are European, they're both multi-generation, you know, they go back 20, 30 years, they're family run, they also have like huge focus on sustainability. One of them just spent a million euros on solar panels, for example. Um, and they both of them bought in to what we were doing from day one, right? So we we really very clearly spelled out the aim of the brand, what we're trying to solve and fix, what the future aspirations are, and they were willing to work with us on that. And so there isn't really within a cost parameter. For example, we've just done a club kit for the local long-distance cycling club. I say that it's it makes them sound small, but they're actually the leading in the country, if not the world. Um, Orda's Club Bristol. They do all these like ultra-long distance rides like Paris Press Paris, like 1300 1400 kilometers. Um, so they really put the kit through its paces. I've been able to do individual rider club pocket numbers on the backs of the pockets, you know. So you've still got this unbelievable quality product. Most of the brands that are able to do that, you know, it's you wouldn't want to stand too near a naked flame wearing their kit, you know, without wanting to be too offensive. It's you know, it's quite basic kit. But um, you know, our model and our supply chain allows us to do that. Um, I've settled on a number for the limited edition, so 350, mainly because it was got to start somewhere, right? It could have been anything. I think you could do 2,000, the size of the global market, you could do a limited edition of 2,500, and it would still be limited edition compared to the rest of the market. But it seemed like a good place to start. And so what happens is, and again, this isn't a new thing, right? It's a painter jacket, do a similar thing, they sell out in like five minutes when they release a new a new batch of jackets. Um, it you basically have a window in which you can order, it may sell out before the end of that window, and so it introduces that bit of FOMO. Obviously, when you introduce the artworks as well, you know, that also if someone likes that particular artist or artwork, they've got to get in quick because they may miss it. Uh it's but you know, it's look at a brand like Supreme, for example. You know, it's that that sort of sensibility of like it may become collectible. And the artists we're working with right now, you know, they're some big name artists, but it's they're not Damien Hearst, right? So there is still room. And I think what's really exciting for me is the storytelling angle. So, you know, if you're trying to build a consumer brand now, especially in something tribal like cycling, the storytelling is really essential. And those artist collaborations, the directions we can go in with those collaborations, you know, it gives us a huge amount of room for storytelling before you even get to the product and the bike and cycling and all those great stories. And longer term, and I may be revealing too much now, but it may not just be artists, right? It that that collaboration could be anyone, it could be a celebrity, it could be another cultural brand, fashion, high fashion brand, or and again, you look to someone like Supreme and the kind of collaborations they do, and and then it gets really exciting. And and then when you start pushing the products potentially outside of cycling, you can imagine where this might go, but the model will always stay the same. And that's the that's the thing that kind of changes the game.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Yeah, I saw I on that. I I had a couple of mugs a few years ago that had the drawings of Roger Moore and I think David Bowie did a drawing as well on this mug, and I can't remember, it was I think it was for Cancer McMillan. They released these rangers of mugs with their these celebrities' art. Now the art was terrible. I mean, I love Roger Moore, but you know, he he was just drawing a stick insect of uh a matchstick men of the saint, right? So yeah, that would look pretty horrible on a t-shirt, but yet it had that real exclusivity to it because it was, you know, the profile name literally just elevated it in my mind. David Bowie one, not so much. And there was someone other someone other celebrity who I forget his name, did one, and I thought, not even I don't even like the celebrity, I don't like his drawing. And my flatmate broke the mug, and he goes, Oh, I'm so sorry, I replaced it. I said, Don't worry, I'm all good. He goes, but this was worth I was like, honestly, it's to me, it's just a mug with a crap drawing on it. I don't give a crap who draw it because I don't like the guy. So this is you know, it's better on the floor in bits than it is in that cupboard. Um but yeah, you so that's actually an interesting window for you, is having I guess people with high profiles that aren't typically known for their art. Now, how does that fare against artists who are known for their art, if you know what I mean? How do you how do you think there's going to be a price comparison or a demand comparison?

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing, right? It's all a big experiment. And the key point there is that we're not making the things in advance, so it really doesn't matter to some extent. If you're having to produce that range up front, like most brands are, then you end up in the issues that retailers are facing at the moment, right? Like how many brands have gone bust in the last year because of the overstock issue. And um, I'd say, right, you know, the last 18 months and maybe two years since the whole consumer crisis has started, that's been the number one issue, right? Is people just can't sell anything or as much. They've all, certainly in the cycling world, very stupidly uh kind of forecast that this growth from from the COVID bubble is going to keep on happening, right? I don't know where they thought these people were going to keep coming from. And then all these brands are just left holding insane amounts of stock. They've got new season stock coming online that's already been planned a long time ago that's going to come into the into the channel. They're discounting like crazy. It's obviously damaging for the brand, it's damaging for the ecosystem. It's just it's just not sustainable at all.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Well, how about I've got a peloton? I'm not sure if that's a swear word on this interview, but is it possible to do the tests and comparison and have the gear that would work on a Peloton as it would in the wild, or is it or is it overkill to wear it just for indoor training?

SPEAKER_00 21:04

No, I think it's absolutely apt, and in fact, in some ways, in some ways, it's more demanding indoors because when you're cycling outdoors, you move around almost imperceptibly at times. You're constantly moving on the bike, whereas in a fixed environment, it's more demand, especially on bib shorts. Um, so yeah, we we've had people who've bought our bibs to kind of buy them, you know, it's not it's not a a cheap purchase, right? Our bibs are 180 pounds. If you compare that to the other market leaders, theirs are more like 230, 250, 300, even. So we're able to actually undercut them. But we've had people coming back to buy a second pair to then wear for their indoor training because they would normally wear cheaper shorts for indoors because it's not as important. But when they've put our shorts on, they it's a guy, a guy made a comment to me, he said it's like that first time you have the 35 pound bottle of wine, you know, and you have to go back to the 999 bottle, and you really kind of see that difference. And yeah, so so we've had quite a lot of people come back and buy a you know, second and third pair. Um Um, so yeah, that's quite interesting. But no, no, I think it's the indoor thing has become a a bigger thing, not just with Peloton, but the the the kind of the trainers that you attach to your bike are become much more affordable. And um Zwift has obviously become a huge thing now. And people actually have racing leagues and you know meet with friends and ride. And obviously, with our weather, obviously we're in the UK. I don't know how many of your users are uh listeners are abroad, but it's been obviously just the wettest I can I can remember.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I mean, it's like I heard a friend of mine say who who makes cricket bats for a living. I used to work for him, and he has to go out and trees, right? So, yeah, some someone had to uh they have to get these trees, like they grow the willow, and it's like 120 years that like the wettest, the wettest season that we've ever had. And I'm like, Yeah, I think it I think it's uh actually getting to the point now where we all need to move to Florida and maybe just come back when there's some kind of a full cycle of I'll I'll I'll tell you something absolutely ridiculous, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:02

So I live very near to uh a lake, and it's an old quarry, uh limestone quarry, and for about 102 years it's been a private swimming club. So back in the old days, this guy people have been dipping in it, and then this guy bought the rights to it and then turned it into a swimming club, right? And so it's you know got a huge history. It's currently closed because of flooding. Oh wow, the the lake has flooded so much that you can't see the edge of the lake or the barriers or the even the handle the handrails that go in. Wow, so the whole thing it's just the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You can't go and use the local swimming lake because the lake is flooded.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

That's like nature reclaiming it, though. It's like, come on, nature's free, isn't it? Beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Someone shared a photo the other day and it looks amazing. So anyway, I'm looking forward to coming back because I'm missing my swims, but yeah, I just thought that was pretty funny.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Um interesting.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

So yeah, anyway, we digress.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

I digress. Well, I I led you down the path, but I'm I'm thinking also what sprung to mind whilst I was looking at the the brand and the the website and the designs, which by the way, you can also see on Instagram. You've got all the links on the website, but on Instagram it's costume.cc again with a K. It's very design driven in terms of the looks, the the actual colours and everything else, the patterns. And I'm thinking people that typically are artists aren't really cyclists, I find. You know, Bradley Wiggins. Well, that's not a good example, but you know what I mean? It doesn't feel like one that transcends or should be in the other. So are you is it ever a struggle to get hold of artists and say, This is my idea, I want you to do something with regards to fitness?

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Sure. Well, it's a that's a very good question as well. I think there are two parts to that question. One is the consumer side of things, right? So I had a obviously had a very strong inkling from my own personal network and experiences that the cyclists that I was riding with and that I knew personally were very creative people. You know, they were graphic designers or they were, you know, they were interested in the creative arts in some way. So so that would that was the original hunch. The the other the other part of that then is the personal relationship side of things. So because obviously I've spent the last 10, 12 years in the art world, I have those relationships on a peer level. So I'm able to, I've kind of proven my worth, you know, I've done some projects that that people have bought into that have been extremely successful. And so I'm able to kind of gain those artists' trust to kind of jump into this new idea. And and also, like, we're not the first brand to have done artist collaborations in the cycling world. We are the first to kind of probably, you know, build our entire ethos and everything around it, um, and certainly to do it with the kind of rigor that we're doing, like treating it almost like an exhibition in terms of the, you know, all of the content we create around it is driven by the artwork. Um, but yeah, I think ultimately it comes down to the opportunity, and that that stems from the consumer. Um and I did some research. Obviously, you know, hunch is one thing, but backing it up is uh is important. And the number of people, and these weren't people in my network, these were people that I purposefully pushed out beyond my network so that I wasn't getting confirmation bias. The number of people that said they owned an original artwork or they were planning to buy one or they went to exhibitions regularly was surprised even me, you know. It was um it was very interesting to see. And it all comes back to this change in demographic. And I think I started this whole uh podcast by talking about my experiences of like being frustrated at everything being focused on heritage and racing and performance and suffering, and that wasn't what I was riding for, and it wasn't what I was seeing other people that I was riding with. And we're not talking like two or three people, we're talking about 150, 200 people, pretty decent sample sample base, very different people. Um, and uh uh and yeah, that that has been borne out, and I think COVID played a role in that. I think the boom that we've seen in the cycling world, people coming into it for the first time, lapsed riders coming back to it. I got the Peloton in COVID. Well, there you go. Yeah, exactly. Runners have been you know switching to cycling or like starting cycling as well, and and so uh those people coming in, and again, I've also got hard numbers about this up. This isn't just a hunch, you know, they're riding for different reasons, they're riding for freedom, adventure, exploration, you know, within groups, on-road, off-road, sometimes in the same ride. They're doing like multi-day events, they're while camping and bikepacking, you know, and and that that's really where the market's going. And I think a lot of the incumbent brands have been very stuck in this kind of narrow field of view of it being the old version of cycling, which was very one one-dimensional training, suffering, racing. I I think I only know about three people that race, and even then, you know, they they do it more for fun than you know, obviously it's painful, it's suffering, but yeah, and yet that's where the majority of the the industry marketing focuses on.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Interesting. Yeah, I just want to dial back a second. I remember getting the Peloton for the for the first time. I think I it's a model one, I think I paid, I don't know, about $1,500 for it. But the the point is, about a week later, I get an email from Peloton saying, hey, we're bringing out a new bike like this week. And uh this new uh we want to give you like 400 quid back because we know that you bought the old model, so we've we've just refunded you 400 quid, you know. Go go play with it. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Like waking up, it's like seven in the morning and I've already got like 400 quid richer, right? I'm thinking, hmm, do I tell the girlfriend? Do I am I the good man? Am I the honest guy? Or do I just think that 400 quid? I could I could use that, you know, I could go places for that, you know, could have a night.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Or you could buy two new two new pairs of costume bib shorts. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

I mean, that's that was that was my next thought. I can get some costume wear. And I thought uh and I went, nah nah. So I went into the bedroom and I I woke her up and I said, like, you wouldn't believe it, but 400 quid back. And she goes, Yeah, I already know. Daily Mail brought an article out, and she was like reading the Daily Mail on her phone. I was like, Well, I did the right thing then, right? Do I not get like a reward or go make me some pancakes? I don't know, something something like that. So that was that. But listen, um, Ed, I've I've gone off the rails, but it's been really interesting to listen, interesting to you, and costume.cc again, costume with a K is a place people can go and check it out, and I recommend they do. Um, any plans for bricks and mortar? I'm gonna guess that we're not in that's a really good question as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

You you got some good questions tonight. Um, so it's an interesting one, right? So it you know, cycling's been get taken a bit of a hammering recently. I I've spent a lot of time in the last year or so talking to investors, right? So um I don't need a huge amount of investment because the mod is so good, but it would be very helpful in terms of scaling things up a little bit, and so it's quite interesting hearing some of the chat that comes back from investors. And what you hear at the moment is cycling's dead, e-commerce is dead, direct to customer is dead. I'm so bored of this, like you know, it's very anyway, so that's a whole other podcast. There's a whole podcast to be done just on that, and it's not got anything to do with menswear or fashion. So we'll we'll we'll leave that one. But there's a lot of frustration there. And the fact is it's it's utter bullshit, like those things aren't dead. We've seen a realignment in those things from a bubble. That doesn't mean they're not incredibly exciting, right? There are some people doing incredible things with e-commerce, direct customer, the freedom that it gives you as a brand and the things that you can do, you know, uh, and not just the financial freedoms, you know, the creative freedoms and so on. Um, however, retail is also not dead, right? Physical retail isn't going away. And and it's been very interesting seeing some of the innovations, some of these kind of pop-ups, and interesting, quite a few that have been coming from more e-commerce-focused brands that are then moving into bricks and mortar, and again, like I said before, coming at it with a different sensibility, right? They don't have that traditional inbound of what retail should be. It's more experiential and and and so on. And so I don't think we'll ever, and never say never. I've listened back to this in five years and let's see, but uh, I don't think we'd ever have permanent fixed spaces. But I made my name in the art space by doing pop-ups, taking over like empty spaces and putting on like incredibly well-produced, fully featured shows. Um and I can see definitely there's there's room for us to do those kinds of things in the in the kind of physical world, um, and and tying the two things together. And I think somebody uh on LinkedIn had a word for it the day, and I don't remember what it was. It was like a uh one of those horrible hybrids of the two different worlds, um like freemium, you know, it was uh, but it was hang on, physical. I don't remember. I'll I'll if I remember, I'll ping you and tell you, but it was a very interesting, it's interesting, it shows how much is happening that someone's now thinking of a word for it, right? Um, so yes, I absolutely do think that there's room for that, but I think certainly the kind of the pop-up side of things, and obviously we're live we live in a world now where there's an awful lot of amazing empty retail space, right? Something has to happen with it. Um, so uh it gives brands like ours a chance to come in and do something short and impactful and creative um and get products in hands because as I said at the start, you know, when someone sees that for the first time and touches it and stretches it for the first time, they really do see that benefit. And unfortunately, you don't get that with a purely online experience. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

Well, like according to that guy, the best thing he's had against his skin.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

There you go. I'm gonna get that tattooed, I think. Actually, that probably isn't a probably uh it's literally skin, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Well, I mean, you also gotta feel sorry for his wife who's bought him a whole load of t-shirts and coats over the years. Okay, well, thanks. Let's just put all that on the bonfire. Yeah. Well, listen, um, I know you've got a hard out. We better crack on. Ed, thanks so much for jumping on and best of luck with the brand, and I hope to speak to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

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