The Ethereal Complexity Of Place
As a strategist I’ve long been interested in how brands can capture a sense of place. Distilling something ethereal and complex and weaving it into a set of beliefs or attitudes. Interpreting our interaction with landscapes to manifest tangible products. Ever since I first stumbled across Carrier Company I’ve been drawn to their distinctive workwear that effortlessly exudes tradition, continuity and modernity whilst also reflecting the beauty and simplicity of the North Norfolk landscape.
Carrier Company is very much a family affair. Founded by Tina Guillory (T) she is now supported by her daughter Sienna and son-in-law Enzo. I caught up with Enzo to discuss how they capture that essence.
“As a brand we've gone past what we what ever hoped to achieve and now it’s just really enjoyable. The end game was always just to get T off the road and for it to be small and comfortable. Now we’re just focused on keeping it manageable, keeping it future proofed and crucially protecting those original ideals in terms of how and where we manufacture and who we work with.
The early days was mostly T selling at physical trade fairs and spending a lot of time on the road. It’s really hard work packing up and long days at the shows then unpacking and hitting the road again. So when Sienna and I moved back from Los Angeles in 2012, we were really keen to get involved and help get T off the road. That’s when the website got revamped.
T started the company in 1995 and it was very much born out of her career as a gardener. The carrier, the original product, was a response to a specific need which is really the ethos behind everything we do. The carrier functioned as a tool roll on your way to the job and then when you get there you can carry clippings and cuttings and flowers and all that stuff.
The family has always sailed a lot so we decided to make our own smock or slop as they’re known in Norfolk. You could buy them anywhere but as granny was getting older she was having trouble getting them on overhead so ours has a wider neck. When she started struggling with that we took the same sail cloth from the slop and made a jacket. That’s the heart of our product design process.
Our work trousers for example - I just couldn’t get on with dungarees and I would always cut off the bib but they were a really good shape for a trouser. That was that. It’s always been organic. It’s very much how T see’s it - work to live not live to work.
Because we’ve never done clothes on a seasonal basis we can be reactive and kind of just make stuff and get it out there when we wanted. It’s really all designed to fit around our family life and the family life of our makers. Quite often you’ll go to pick something up and they’re just finishing something off with grandchildren scurrying around the garden.
It’s the same when it comes to photography. A good friend of ours who’s a director and photographer always said ‘just make sure you’re in the pictures’. We’ve used local photographers, but we also do a lot of the photography ourselves. It’s a reflection of how we live like ‘let’s get our work done in the morning and head to the beach in the afternoon and you just take some photos against the sky’.
Mostly this is driven out of necessity because we’re small. In terms of the creative and artistic side of things it’s just the three of us and none of us are trained designers or photographers. I think we’d struggle if we didn’t just make stuff that was honest and that we actually wear. Same for the photography - it just reflects how we live. We’d mess it up if we tried to project anything other than the truth.”