The draughty neck

How many times can you zip before it fails?

I'm obsessing about necks. Hoodies specifically. It's still cold, summer is theoretical at best, and I've been staring at a zip that stops at the collarbone.

That's right. Zip it all the way up and you've still got an inch of neck to the wind. Design shortcut, plain and simple.

Zip’s that fail in month one

I've owned garments that are ancient. The zip still works perfectly. I've owned branded hoodies, and no-name, but branded hurts- selling you hype and tribe hoodies where the zip gave up before the first month was out.

It's easy to fake quality on the hanger. Before the third wash. Before the 50th zip. After that, you find out what you actually bought.

A zip upgrade adds cost per unit. A stitch density change adds cost per unit. These decisions get made, quietly, in favour of margin. The sale is what matters and it ends there.

I get it. Getting things made well is genuinely hard. The entire manufacturing industry is, from a structural perspective, substandard. That's not an excuse, it's the problem. It’s just how it’s done. This is changing, fast.

So, what do you do with that?
You research. Zips that don't fail exist- you’ll find them in mountain wear, for example. Who makes them, who tests them, are they compatible with the garments you're building.

And then you think about everything else. Colours that are kind to sweat. Care and repair. Spares for the parts that can't manage 25 years. A 14-year-old People Tree (RIP) sweater in my cupboard with fraying sleeves tells me organic cotton can go the distance; the rest is just decisions.

That's what building for lifetime wear actually looks like from the inside. Whether it’s zips or fasteners, plastic or metal, recyclable or not, all these designs effect the cost and profit outcomes, do I believe it is possible for Mongrel Logic to change the world in this regard? No, I’m not that naïve. But I am determined to try anyway. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change my underpants.

Mongrel Logic is 2 months old!

Mongrel Logic Cupcake with Logo icing (not its not real, how else do you give a website and a brand a cake?)

I’m not going to lie, that was painful. It was fun, but also painful. I have built a shop, rebuilt a website, more times than I can remember, our designs are rolling. Fixed embarrassing errors, all of them, I hope.

We’ve got new designs coming

I’m working on our next design as, well…not as I type that would make me an octopus. But now. Currently.

Now it’s time to spread our wings

It’s been a massive amount of work to get here. I’ve been up till ungodly hours sorting out everything from marketing strategies to future Core Range designs and our Limited-Edition range.

It’s all been worth it.

I started the blog two years ago with no direction and just waffled on for over a year before I developed any of this. I have some loyal bloody crew that have watched me do this from the start and talk about everything from cutting down trees to the thing that sparked the cap idea. I’ve built this in public, which we will continue to do. I started with nothing, I started before the idea, and here we are.

Excited for 2026

There is a lot in store for 2026, we have artists we will feature, we have the designer range, launching next year and will continue to grow our circular, sustainable, deliciously soft organic cotton designs, bringing you circular, wearable art that’s been built to endure.

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It was hard to stop, this digital cupcake features our first design. I’m hungry now.

Wearable logic. Circular by design.

First life: catching golden-hour wind on a skater’s back. Next life? Whoever needs it next. Clothes should travel; not landfill.

If we were all to have a penny for the world’s problems right now, we’d have a lot of pennies. I’m not here to lecture you. We know. By now we all know. We’ve all been told to quit, and we’re all out back smoking thirty at once.

But we can do better than 90 million tons of textile waste.

The good news? The solutions already exist. One of them is our King’s Award winning Third-party production and fulfilment service. Everything we make is organic cotton, dyed with a process clean enough to produce drinkable water; and every piece is fully recyclable when it reaches the end of your story with it.

Circular Fashion is the future.

Not in a trending way. In a logical way. A single garment can serve multiple lives:

·       a first owner

·       a second owner

·       a second-hand market

·       and finally, Remill; where it’s respun into something new

Remember hand-me-downs? Cousins’ shirts? Clothes used to travel. Fast fashion and poor quality are what broke that system.

Recycling textiles is just the beginning.

For me, the ethos behind the build has been the backbone of everything, from designing the world’s most amazing cap (coming in 2026) to choosing our fulfilment service. Organic. Circular. Sustainable. Renewable energy.
Not buzzwords; decisions.

Organic, Circular, Sustainable, Renewable Energy

It’s as much about what I want to see as what fashion should be. Something that can be passed down from generation to generation, or something that can serve a second life on a market elsewhere. Not end up in landfill.

Built with purpose

And with Mongrel Logic.