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.

Subscribe to The Studio Dispatch for more.

That’s our newsletter.

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.

What is The Mongrel Studio?

The first Mongrel Studio logo; the creative home behind Mongrel Logic’s sustainable design philosophy

The Mongrel Studio is where I designed my first cap. It had no name back then. It’s a physical space as much as it is a space inside my head. Where the ridiculous and the incredible are possible. I am one of those people who is interested in everything. I have the good fortune of wide-ranging experience.

I love both the light and the dark, I can easily be found cleaning with Devil wears Prada running in the background listening to Lorna Shore whilst contemplating why we’re trying to terraform a planet with no rotating core. This example isn’t exclusive.

Why did I develop The Mongrel Studio?

I can’t help with Mars. But after I designed the cap, I developed the studio to answer the design questions I have been asking my whole life. Why we do things the way we do and how I could do it better.

When I was a kid; at The Kruger National Park my brother and I slept in a one-man tent that was dripping with condensation, listening to Hyenas sniffing around the campsite. I still hate tents.

One night, there was an infestation of black beetles that stank worse than anything I have ever smelled. They gathered around lights and died in the thousands. I will never forget that smell, it took my breath away like horseradish or wasabi. I love both of those, I just mean the compound in the smell, it knocks your breath back into your throat.

I was looking at the streetlight outside the other night, it was at about midnight, and there was one lonely bug swirling around it; getting ever closer to the spider web spun across the light. It made me sad. I have always loved nature and deplore how we live with it.

What does this have to do with caps? Nothing. And everything. It’s the backbone of everything I do. It’s important to design with nature in mind. We must do things better. It can’t just be about profit and eating up resources. I don’t have an answer to it all. But I finally have a home for my mad scientist to live.

From a Cap to Solving the world’s problems

I want to help that lonely bug, and I want to help people be able to earn their own money. If you can’t afford to eat, you can’t afford to care about insects. The focus right now is making a cap that, with care, will last you a lifetime. It’s something that your kid might dig out of your cupboard in 20 years’ time and claim it as their own. Using the right materials. Not producing landfill in the form of fast fashion. Creating products that have a life on the second-hand market. Limited, capsule drops under the label Mongrel Logic™.

Transparency is key as well, I think. I don’t have everything figured out yet, six months ago there was no brand, just a blog and me trying to figure out what my next step was. Now I am madly pulling together design files and hunting for the right collaborator.

The next chapter for the studio

The next chapter is finding a collaborator, making the cap and launching it. After that, I have more tricks up my sleeve and a vision. The vision being the development of a house that empowers others to do the same and bring access to those who don’t have it.

How is Mongrel Studios going to help?

I know this is bigger than me. The hard part will be getting it done, but I’m not sweating. It starts with our signature edition cap, motivated by a desire to see people win, because we can’t solve the worlds problems if we are all constantly losing.

Welcome to Mongrel Studio.

If you are still reading, thank you. Follow along to see the cap launch unfold and watch what becomes of this space. Collaborators welcome. Subscribe to the newsletter; coming soon and follow on socials. This is just the beginning.