Cold Laundry Launches its SS20 Collection 'Redemption' - but what does it mean to the brand?

‘REDEMPTION’

noun
The action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.
"God's plans for the redemption of his world"

If you’re a frequent visitor of our page, which we’d hope you are, you’ll have undoubtedly seen an abundance of Cold Laundry content on the feed.

Since its initial launch in January 2019, the brand has grown immensely over the past year and after a few months of being quiet, Cold Laundry is back with their latest collection ‘Redemption’.

We caught up with Ola Labi, co-founder of Cold Laundry with his wife Cerise, to talk about the brand, it’s spectacular growth, their teething problems and challenges, and most importantly what ‘Redemption’ means to them.

Explain the brand name: ‘Cold Laundry’

Its crazy, me and Cerise were sitting in Pret A Manager just discussing brand names, and Cerise kept saying it had to have laundry in it as she thought that was a pretty cool name to have for a brand but it had to have something to flow with. We had several attempts for hours and nothing came, I then said to her ‘Cold’ that’s it!!! Cold Laundry, yes! It was an instant hit. Cold is London slang for dope so it made sense. So in a nutshell, Cold laundry just means dope clothes. It just rolled off the tongue nicely and felt clean - it was an instant hit.

We’ve been following your journey closely here at nclgallery since you guys had less than 5K followers. How do you feel about the incredible growth you’ve had in little over a year?

It’s been actually crazy. To be honest, Cold Laundry started as a project, me and Cerise have a deep love for fashion and we just wanted to express our take and ideas and see where it took us. Cerise wanted to create a clothing brand and wanted us to do it together, we’ve always enjoyed working together in the past on projects so it wasn’t like a business move, we didn’t see a ‘gap in the market’ to create a brand that was destined to succeed, it was just created out of love and passion. So when we saw the brand picking up crazy momentum 3-4 months in, it was a beautiful thing to see. Overwhelming at times but we understand what a blessing it is to start something and see it flourish from so early on.

It’s evident how quickly you guys have grown, however, as we all know this comes with problems. What’s been the biggest challenge for you?

Cold Laundry started off as a side project, I really didn’t take it too seriously. Growing so fast is something we were not ready for. We didn’t really understand the business of fashion, we didn’t really understand how to run a seamless fashion brand. It’s something we’ve had to learn along the way and still are learning.

I think the biggest issue we faced was our customer service not being up to par. It was just two of us running the whole business at one point and when you throw in having kids, trying to run our little pop-up in Boxpark and also trying to keep on top of all areas of the business, it was a nightmare at one point.

Another thing was having to deal with peoples misconceptions about the brand and how we sourced or produced our clothes. That was a hard pill to swallow and also was detrimental to the brand at one point.

But the move from part producing our clothes to a full cut and sew process has been the biggest challenge so far. However, we are happy we took this path as it has set us up to really be in a position where we can create with no boundaries and really bring our take on fashion to our growing community.

Your new season ‘Redemption’ launches on June 5th, can you talk a little bit about the name and what this new collection means to you as a brand?

The Spring/Summer Redemption Collection and the name ‘Redemption’ represents a new opportunity.

Anything that has the potential to inspire, will always endure criticism.
While it may seem like a setback at the beginning, it offers an opportunity to grow, to create, and to come back stronger. Everything we have gone through has only improved us as a brand.

I’ve been lucky enough to see some of your ‘WIP’ pics directly, do you think the move to manufacturing here in Europe, Portugal specifically, is going to make a huge difference?

Yes 100%, just being closer to home will make a huge difference and working with a trusted family-run factory that understands our needs and gets the quality we are trying to achieve has made a huge difference also.

The quality, the finishing, and the capabilities are endless. Producing in Portugal with matched quality with some of the top brands in the industry will definitely give us more credibility. We are now able to create our own fabrics, push sustainability in ways we couldn’t before and finally have a team who gets our overall vision moving forward.

What are your favourite pieces from the new collection?

My favourite pieces are the Enzo sets and the Patch Top sets. There’s a certain effortless elegance these pieces give off which I love. Our colours this season are insane, I look at the collection on a whole and think there’s not one piece I wouldn’t wear myself, maybe that’s a bit bias but it’s a beautiful feeling!

What do you hope to achieve from ‘Redemption’?

I just want people to see the hard work, passion, hunger, and drive. This is our biggest collection to date. A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into this. I just want it to be received positively.

I also want people to see the growth in the overall running of the business and that our past experiences have made us stronger.

One of the things you guys are really known for is your campaign photography, how do you come up with the inspo and ideas?

Bro, honestly I think this is one of the things that really sets us apart from other brands. We research for hours, we travel to locations beforehand to see if it looks as good as it does in the pictures. Pinterest is also our friend, that helps a lot!

Me and our photographer (Oghalealex) scout locations every day and send each other ideas and places we’ve found on a daily basis. It’s a rewarding process when you see the final results.

Post COVID-19, what are your plans for the brand? We’ve seen some new pages crop up such as @coldlaundrycafe, and @coldlaundryhome… can you give us a little taster of what’s to come?

Post-COVID, we will be opening our new store on Redchurch Street in London, which is where we will also introduce the Cold Laundry Cafe - an added Cafe experience for our customers. Super excited! We aim to start producing homeware for the Fall/Winter. I’ll keep you guys posted with this one!

Can we expect a collaboration with another brand in the near future?

Yes for sure, if it makes sense we would love to! But it’s got to make sense.

Cold Laundry’s SS/20 collection, Redemption launches on June 5th at 6PM GMT - Click here to shop.