Built To Endure

Building this world has led me through a universe of phrases, words, and slogans. Built to endure was one of the first.

 
With the unearthing of The Canis, which is currently worming its way into every SEO corner and page on our websites, our original language is being replaced.

Yours truly drawing Lilith’s Corsage, with an older landing page visible on screen. Dec 2025.

Hopefully not completely erased.  

Today, I removed the last visual trace of The Mongrel Studio page, it’s still there in practice, but our little placeholder now has a purpose beyond that. I’m feeling slightly nostalgic about stuff no one knows about but me.

The backbone of everything we do

Built to endure is and always will be at the heart of everything we do. From story to garment, it’s been designed to travel with you. Live with you. And be recycled once you’re done with it. Sustainability is and always will be at the core.  

Built to endure hoodies

When what you’re building starts evolving under you, calls itself “The Canis” and takes over your social feed, I find myself hesitating over the delete button. The ‘built to endure’ hoodie is still in the shop. I know it doesn’t fit.  I can’t bring myself to remove it. It’s already evolved once when we ran out of the recycled fabric colours.

The Originals

The designs that I started the shop with, will not be there for much longer either. My weird little teenage beasties are being absorbed into The Canis.

Sometimes I can’t believe I put them on hoodies.

Broken proverbs

I can’t tell you the story of where ‘Confusion Says’ comes from. Let’s just say I had a wild childhood, and this proverb was a product of it and my brother’s insane sense of humour.
I have no idea whether broken proverbs have a place to grow within The Canis.

Raise a glass

To the originals, to the early language, to the first iteration of Mongrel Logic, as we are absorbed into The Canis. If you have been here from the start, I hope you have enjoyed watching this happen. I feel like I haven’t slept in a year.

How Organic Growth Effects Design

I started this business with an idea, a pencil and every free version of software you can imagine, from google docs to the first free-website blog.

I haven’t spent anything on ads, sponsorship or traffic. Yet.

It’s been 8 months since I launched the shop and over a year of solid build from websites to caps. I had to do it this way.

Organic cotton, emblematic of our organic growth journey

Socials are not the only strategy

Organic growth on social media, is like swimming upstream.

You are playing for free, in a pay to play environment.

Platforms that are designed to feed you sponsored content, are not going to prioritise unpaid content, that’s the simple version. Never mind algorithms.

It’s also unavoidable if you’re trying to sell something whether that is a t-shirt, a service or your personality. When you have a zero spend strategy, it’s a brutal combination. Unless you happen to have a large…personality.

It means slow growth, minimal distribution and many nights spent looking at every single little thing to make sure that I have done everything I can to move any kind of lever because that is all I can do.

Which also got me thinking…

What if all socials vanished tomorrow?

How would you promote your business?

No Instagram, no TikTok, no Reddit, imagine absolutely everything was gone or this list will get stupid.

What would you do to get the word out?

It’s made me look at what we offer in a different way.
On platforms made to entertain, how do I entertain? And how do I reach people offline?
I started looking for growth opportunity elsewhere, for story, for development, at strategy and landed on something interesting.

Recognise The Canis

This is fragment one. This is the start of what has been a seemingly endless development journey which has led me to characters, tokens and worlds. It’s unfolding and to be discovered.  And the reason why I’ve been scribbling down notes at 1am again.

Cryptic I know

And for good reason. Find The Canis. This is an example of what zero spend can do to design, when you’re forced to design your way out of constraints. It’s conceptual and being slowly released but, on paper, almost brilliant.

Organic design is the outcome

I’m not going to lie, although it’s a constant constraint, zero spend is fundamental for another few months, whether that is fortunate, or unfortunate remains to be seen.

What it does to your design strategy, however, is worth experiencing.
What do you do when you can’t buy attention?

It’s an exercise I’d recommend to any founder. If you can handle it. I have started from zero. I have fully formed business architecture, a designer range in development, a sustainable, circular core system that has just morphed into The Canis, and it all started with a blog called The Pavement Special. I don’t mean to blow smoke up my ass, but no one else is so…

I’m painfully aware of how many businesses fail and how many challenges there are ahead. I just can’t seem to stop. Sometimes I think I should…but then I end up starting another design, or mapping out worlds or fretting over dye, or sitting down to write, or making tiktoks (shakes her fists at the sky), or working on strategy, or tweaking the website, or…

P.S  Or that’s how you know this wasn’t written by AI. K’ Bye.

What is Mongrel Logic

It’s been a little while since I have answered this question.
Mongrel Logic is me.

A flip on a negative

A close up the Pastel Eye design.

I’m not an idiot when it comes to linguistics.  I am also not an idiot when it comes to emotions. I chose the name The Pavement Special originally, to name a thing that hadn’t been defined. That way I could write about whatever I wanted and in theory, the name could remain unchanged. I do enjoy business architecture.

I started a blog with no direction, zero SEO, literally a digitised dear diary. I needed a place to just write without thinking too much.

But, I spent 8 months not doing anything because I got two puppies. the month after starting it. Two. Littermates. If you know, you know. Turns out I am an idiot about some things.

One sunny afternoon we were coming off a dog walk, we were attacked by a bigger dog, who lives in our cul-de-sac, I might add. Everyone was physically ok. Lex has never been the same since. He thought the world was butterflies and sunshine before that moment. Zen is the more, suffer in silence, type. Just like me.

Rage fuelled caps

I was so angry about the dog off lead, the effect on the puppies, the effect on me, the fact that he made no adjustments and just kept walking the dog past our house, every day, three times a day. We had to make all the adjustments. I don’t blame the dog. Ever.

But a piece of my mind involves a piece of my fist due to the rage around this situation, so I decided to do something else instead.
Try to raise awareness, make a cap, donate profits to an organisation that cared about dog welfare and who can lobby. I have not forgotten about this. I never will.
And when it comes to animal welfare, the welfare of those less fortunate, you have found my hulk smash button. Now, I don’t have big fists, in fact when I look at a pinky-finger I am baffled that such a small bony thing can exist.  

I built a monster

I started working on the embroidery for the cap first, and I started looking at makers. Very soon discovered that my print on demand idea was not executable.  No custom fabrics. Hardly anyone did embroidery at that level.

I knew I needed to have the fabric made. I knew the cap construction needed to be custom, the embroidery needed an expert. I started hunting.  

This is where the designer range was born. Months of research, designing, and work and some number crunching, led to me to where I am now. I have spent nothing on this business; aside from running the websites, I don’t have anything to spend. As much as it is a practical reality for me, it is also part of a system I am testing. The reproducibility of the model. More on that later.

When I understood what I needed to get the cap made, the designer range off the ground, I knew I needed an engine. Something to fuel the designer range, that could stand on its own as well as exist as crossover, and crucially, matched the ethos of the luxury streetwear range I was developing.  I needed one project to fund the next one. Yes, fuck is right.

That’s when the art came into it, drawings that for some inexplicable reason I had held onto, taken across continents with me, suddenly had a purpose. The worlds I was building as a teenager, the stories, characters, novellas and the fifth try at starting a business and the second at a clothing line, suddenly all made sense.

That was the last time anything made sense. Haha.

Being responsible for the life cycle of your product is extremely important to me. I was born in Africa. I have lived equal numbers of years on both the African and European continents by now.  I know what it is like to be part of the problem and part of the solution.
I’m far from perfect, but I am so sick of the lazy, profit driven, greed led approach to business that I wanted to build something better.

Where regulations follow

You can call me naïve in 12-24 months, in the meantime, hold my beer. You may not be old enough to remember this, but products used to come with a lifetime guarantee. Microwaves, dishwashers, washing machines, fridges, all came with a guarantee. Not a warranty, a guarantee.  These days it’s hard to find anything that lasts more than 12 months. Organic cotton will still be in your wardrobe in a decade, just starting to fray.
When you design with the product’s entire life cycle in mind, you need to ensure you can answer for its journey once its owner is done with it, and it has to be made first from ingredients that allow it to be returned, remade.

Being early is only half the problem

I hope I get to bring my vision to life. I’m never convinced that it’ll work, but I am determined to try, because if it does, we are ahead of the regulations that will absolutely be brought in regarding product lifecycle.
When I chose Teemill, it was because they aligned on a design level.

When I ordered my first sample, I was honestly surprised at the quality. And the print colour was stunning. I knew I had found my engine. It’s been 7 months since I launched the shop, and it’s been 9 months since I came up with the idea for the cap. I feel like I’ve been working for four years.

The fact that I can’t spend on growth is agonising, but also crucial for the first 12 months. Which is kinda soul destroying in a way, being in this phase of the business, I have no idea what people think.  Releasing vintage, unchanged teenage art first, was the hardest test this little engine could pass. And we did.

Designing with constraint, whether that is showing art that was in skill unrefined, and not changing it, designing within our print box, no sleeves, no backs, no cuffs, no detail, has honestly allowed me to play in ways I never imagined with the designer range and prompted me to think about details I might have otherwise overlooked.

I can honestly say there is nothing like it out there. For both our everyday sustainable, circular streetwear range and our designer range. I’m not here to shit on other people’s designs, I love streetwear. Whether understated or street couture that serves one purpose and that is to photograph, I’ve been a lifelong fan. Are we the underdog? Absolutely, this was built for underdogs. Will you have seen anything like this before? No. Why? Cos I drew it when I was 14, 16, 17. Etc. And because I have been designing this range for a very long time.

Way before the dogs, before the blog, when I was still in primary school, scrap booking fabrics, dresses, cuts, colours.

This is Mongrel Logic.