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.

This One's For The Underdogs

Not the word. The actual thing, Mongrel Logic.
The kids who cleared hallways just by existing. The ones who were too loud, too quiet, too weird, too much, not enough. The ones who got their lunch money taken and their ideas ignored and still showed up the next day with something to prove.

Mongrel Logic, built for the underdogs. Lex the dog, brand mascot and co-founder.

That's who Mongrel Logic is for

Not because it's a good marketing angle. Because it's where this came from. I am the weirdo. The loner. The underdog mongrel who will not stop once it sets its mind on something. I built this because I had to and I built it for the people who understand that feeling without needing it explained.
Metal heads. Hip hop heads. Underground everything. People who'd like to see the world work better and have quietly stopped waiting for permission. People who don't need external validation and have learned to survive without it even when they do.

You don't wear Mongrel Logic to fit in

You wear it because you stopped trying to. The street is the catwalk. Always has been. We just build like we know it.

What it means to be early.

In a space that is arguably saturated, being early is a genuinely annoying problem to have. When I started this business, a single idea exploded into a full-blown world, system and vision.

One person. Infinite space.

Sustainable streetwear is born

There are people doing elements of what I'm building here, but not all of it together. And almost no one doing what I'm developing with the designer range. More on that soon.

Creating wearable art is the first expression of Mongrel Logic. I have never fit in boxes and I'm not about to start now. This is art for people like me, who listen to metal, hip-hop, Opera, acid jazz and R&B, who grew up on surf, skate and anarchy. Colour meets psychosis. But equally important is building something that endures, not just in the wardrobe, but in the world. Systems that are better than what exists today.  

Being early is not an ego statement

It's just a fact. We have a long way to go before fashion stops adding to the problem. I'm trying to do things better. Build better, last longer, endure.

Fashion should be heirlooms

Not landfill. I'm the first of a very particular kind of thing, bringing circularity to everyday wear, wearable art and mythology to streetwear, and a designer range built to last a lifetime.

That’s Mongrel Logic

For those who see it before the rest.

A Christmas Of Refinement.

Lilith’s Corsage in progress

Much to the annoyance of everyone around me, the amount of work I have been doing to build this little engine that could, has kept me up so late that I almost saw Santa.

Have you ever dreamed in ctrl c, ctrl v?

Neither had I, until I started building the shop. I now find myself waking in the night with tension from holding down Ctrl +C and not pasting it, because technically, I’m asleep. This should give you some indication of how many alt texts, descriptions, documents, versions, oh my!

The little engine that could.

Four days of drawing later, our latest design, Lilith’s Corsage, is now on the website. I wanted to do a lily, but not floral in the traditional sense. I pulled elements from older drawings and folded them into the piece; that’s where the checkerboard petals come from, for example.

I guess now the test of the dream begins.

Not the ctrl copy and paste dream. The whole thing. I’ve tried breaking it, and it stands. And now I’m about to roll the proverbial boulder down the hill.

Too many metaphors?

This is the first chance I’ve had to flex in two weeks of product design, store development, and endless strategy work. So yes, too many metaphors. My brain is trying to wake up after long hours of repetitive tasks. It’s not quite there yet.

A refined store front and some new pyjamas.

That’s really…a wonderful thing.

This Got Out of Hand: How a One-Month Website Move Became a Beast of a Business

Concept artwork symbolising Mongrel Logic growing from a small blog into a full design studio.

I’m back baby!

Remember when I said this would take a month?

Yeah…try three. But it’s not because I ghosted. It’s because the tiny thing I thought I was doing decided to grow teeth.

I was just planning on moving website platforms, moving my domain, I have reasons.
Since then, things have escalated. Fast. Somewhere between “I don’t know what I’m talking about” and “I think I designed a cap”: I created a beast.

It's not just a cap. I’m now thinking about ateliers, military embroiders or Japanese, maybe even an upholsterer. All in the pursuit of what might be the coolest cap ever made.

Sorry I took so long…

The timeline blew up. But so did the dream. What started as a blog shuffle is now pointing towards building regenerative, limited, luxury products that actually mean something.

Why I Named it that: The Unexpected Story Behind My Brand

The Pavement Special Logo designed by Kerryn Hewitt

This is the story about how my brand names came to be. How a solo, self-discovery voyage turned into a design studio. It’s also an example of why doing something is better than doing nothing.

What’s with the name?

After years of starting blogs then abandoning them; I finally came up with the name The Pavement Special when planning blog number five. A pavement special is South African slang for a mongrel dog. I’ve always found it funny because I identified. That’s a bit like me.

The Pavement Special was born

I chose The Pavement Special because I needed a place to talk about anything and everything until I figured out what I was making or doing, so it seemed appropriate.
I had no idea what the blog was about. I didn’t bother with SEO at all for the first year, I just wrote whatever I wanted or thought I should write. I had two starting points. I can write (ish), and I can draw (hmm). Everything else was in the dark. I’ve felt like a pavement special my whole life. I decided to own it.

I had no idea that I would be getting puppies shortly after, who were, coincidentally, mongrels.

Mongrel Logic and Mongrel Studio soon followed.

After a year of writing I finally planned my first product off the back of a dog attack. Sounds worse than it was, I was trying to process it and deal with two extremely anxious dogs when I thought of my signature design.

None of this was planned, it was discovered in the moment.

When I wrote my first blog article, I thought it might be a blog about helping spouses of partners with PTSD. Turns out, I really hate talking about my problems. I’m more… solution oriented as a person. I tried writing reviews, I wrote about things I’d seen but after I came up with the cap, I wrote about business. That’s when everything changed. That was roughly six months ago.

Welcome to The Pavement Special, a blog about my brand Mongrel Logic and my design studio, Mongrel Studio.

If you had asked me two years ago if I would be sitting here doing this, I would have told you, you were crazy. I planned to do the blog, but I went in blind. I was going stir crazy thinking about it and I had to start just doing it. The hardest part of that has been spotting the patterns in my own mongrel madness to discover what I was making. Now? I’ve designed a cap I cannot wait to wear. What started as a humble blog and…really me thinking out loud, has turned into a signature edition premium cap.