Edzard van der Wyck, Co-Founder of Sheep Inc. / Natural Merino Wool Clothing

In this episode of the Menswear Style Podcast, we speak with Edzard van der Wyck, CEO and co-founder of Sheep Inc., the London-based knitwear brand combining premium natural fibres, regenerative farming, technology and radical supply-chain transparency to challenge the conventional fashion model.

Edzard’s route into fashion began in film production, working across Los Angeles and London on narrative projects, commercials and music videos. His growing fascination with fashion branding and the emergence of digital-first businesses eventually led him to launch his first company in the women’s underwear market.

While building that business, however, Edzard gained first-hand insight into fashion’s environmental footprint. It prompted a bigger question: if you could start again with a blank sheet of paper, what should a fashion brand designed for the future actually look like?

That question became Sheep Inc.

Rather than beginning with manufacturers and working backwards, Edzard and co-founder Michael approached the problem from the raw material upwards. We discuss why transparency became fundamental to the business and why knowing exactly where a garment comes from is about much more than simply providing customers with an interesting story.

Edzard explains the problems inherent in traditional fashion supply chains, where brands may have limited visibility beyond their immediate manufacturers, and why understanding every stage is essential if companies genuinely want to reduce their environmental impact.

The conversation takes a deep dive into natural fibres, particularly the differences between cashmere and merino wool. While both can produce exceptionally soft and luxurious knitwear, Edzard explains why Sheep Inc. ultimately focused on merino wool and began investigating how regenerative farming could transform its environmental impact.

We explore what regenerative farming actually means, including rotational grazing, biodiversity, soil recovery and carbon sequestration, and how Sheep Inc. identified farms in New Zealand that could supply the quality of wool required while operating under a very different agricultural model.

The result is a supply chain designed around naturally reducing and sequestering carbon rather than relying on purchased offsets. The wool is sourced from regenerative farms in New Zealand before being spun in Italy using renewable energy, with manufacturing also taking place in Europe.

But Sheep Inc.’s approach goes beyond materials.

Michael’s background in fintech and technology helped the company develop its own digital supply-chain system, allowing individual garments to be tracked throughout their production journey. Every Sheep Inc. garment contains an NFC tag that customers can tap with their phone to discover where the wool came from, how the garment was made and information about its journey through the supply chain.

Customers are even connected with a sheep from the farm their wool originates from.

We also discuss Sheep Inc.’s Time Capsule feature, which allows owners to add photographs, memories and information about their experiences with a garment. The idea is to give clothing greater emotional value over time, encouraging people to maintain, treasure and wear pieces for longer rather than treating fashion as disposable.

For Edzard, longevity is as important as reducing the initial environmental impact. Sheep Inc. therefore concentrates on high-quality wardrobe staples alongside increasingly design-led collections intended to remain relevant beyond a single season.

That includes the brand’s Wave collection, inspired by the way white light fractures into different colours. Edzard discusses how Sheep Inc.’s in-house design team is increasingly exploring the artistry and technical possibilities of knitwear through more intricate patterns and statement pieces.

The wider conversation examines fashion’s changing relationship with sustainability and why consumers are becoming increasingly interested in where their clothes come from. Edzard draws parallels with the transformation of the food industry, where provenance, organic production and animal welfare have gradually become part of mainstream purchasing decisions.

We also discuss why education could play an important role in changing future behaviour and why consumers asking simple questions about provenance can ultimately force brands to become more transparent.

A fascinating conversation about regenerative agriculture, merino wool, technology, traceability, carbon impact and the future of responsible fashion — and why Sheep Inc. believes the story of a garment should begin long before it reaches your wardrobe.

Menswear Style listeners can receive 20% off at Sheep Inc. using the code MWRStyle on orders over £100.

www.menswearstyle.co.uk

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:12

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Men's Wear Style Podcast. I'm your host, Pete Brocker, and today on the show I am talking to Edzard Vandewick. He is the CEO and co-founder of Sheep Inc. Edzard is gonna give a very eloquent introduction to the brand. So I'm not gonna give you the thumbnail sketch, but I can tell you that over at Sheepinc.com you can get a discount exclusive, exclusive to you guys from us and the people at Sheepink. Let me give you that code right now. It is MWRStyle, and that is 20% off for menswear style for both US and the regular store. There's a minimum purchase amount which is set to £100, but that code again is MWRStyle, and you'll get 20% off at Sheepinc.com. And here is Edzard Vanderwick himself to tell you all about Sheep Inc.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

So um my going back a tiny bit, but my original background is actually in film production. So I kind of started my career working in LA and London, um especially kind of in both narrative film, but then also started to kind of wait more and more towards doing uh kind of commercials and music videos. And during that time got very interested in actually kind of fashion branding, um, and especially how do you create uh fashion brands in a kind of at the time kind of a newly emerging digital environment. Um, you know, as kind of more and more brands were starting to go online, um, you were starting to see, of course, an um a bunch of fashion brands pop up. And the thing that I got very interested in was how could you create, I suppose, iconic digital brands? We had plenty of kind of iconic fashion brands offline, um, traditional retail brands. Um, but for me, the real question came like actually, if you want to replicate some of these amazing kind of aspirational and um these amazing aspirational luxury fashion brands that again are so successful in more of a retail space, how can you kind of replicate that in an online environment? Um, so how could you be kind of a modern digital fashion brand? And so to that end, I set up my first business, um, which was in a very different space from where I'm where I am now, was actually in the women's underwear space. Um, the reason for having chosen that is that um at the time uh the women's underwear branding especially was very much dominated by the kind of Victoria's Secret type aesthetic, which is kind of a relatively simplistic view of femininity and kind of sexuality and womanhood. Um and on top of that, I felt the products in the space basically could um you could kind of approach it in a slightly different way, which was less focused on aesthetic and really focused on um kind of more of a kind of like Nike style approach, I would argue, um, where you really focus on kind of form and movement um of the body. And so to that end, set up that business and grew that, I suppose, relatively quickly over um the years that I was there. Um, but during that time, as much as I was proud of the business that I was creating, started to get real firsthand insight into fashion's impact on the environment and started to get very, very passionate about what would a brand of tomorrow look like if it had kind of one eye on obviously this kind of cliff edge that we're barreling towards, like how can a fashion brand or how should a fashion brand behave, knowing that there has to be this kind of huge, drastic shift in industry behavior. Um, and so to that end, I left um my previous business and um spent about two years kind of working on what would eventually become Sheep Inc. Um, and so in short, what Sheep Inc. is is we are a knitwear brand, um a kind of like a high-end essentials and design-led knitwear brand. Um, but I think our real innovation comes not only in our kind of product quality, but very much in our approach to how we do things. Um, again, once I left my previous business and knowing that I wanted it to be this kind of innovative, sustainable offering, I had the benefit at the time of having a blank sheet of paper to kind of really figure out how to build up the business. Um, I'd very quickly figured out that I did want to create a knitware brand because I'd also spent quite a few years selling women's underwear. And as much as I was kind of, you know, passionate about the business, it was always complicated in the sense that I wasn't the uh the end recipient of the product. So I knew that any business I wanted to set up from then on would be something that I could actually personally have wear and understand and have an opinion on. Um, but again, the the real challenge for us came kind of knowing that we wanted to create a network brand was like, okay, how do you behave? Like, how do you set up supply chain? How do you use technology in a smart way? Basically, how do you kind of bring everything together in the business um to form an entity that um has a better way of doing things than what happens in the traditional with it with any of a kind of traditional fashion brand? And so the starting point for us was therefore um supply chain. Um if you look at kind of the real impact of fashion, most of it comes from uh supply chain supply chain impact, so if it comes kind of scope three emissions, and um that means and and the real issue with traditional fashion supply chains is also the fact that uh brands don't necessarily have visibility on where they're creating things, and that's a huge, huge problem in the space. Again, we're now kind of far more aware of all these problems, but especially when I was setting up sheep inc, it wasn't as common knowledge that all these things were such an issue. But the the real problem is not only the supply chain impact, but again, the fact that fashion brands don't necessarily really understand their own supply chain. And that comes from the fact that a lot of them deal with directly with if they're creating something, they deal directly with manufacturers. They don't necessarily see down to the yarn stage, down to the raw material stage. A lot of brands actually also don't know where they are manufacturing, they deal with one entity that then potentially spreads manufacturing across a couple of couple of factories, so they don't actually understand where they're making stuff. And that's how you have um events happen like the Ragnar Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, which was of course um a horrific, um, a horrific incident. Um, but the most horrific, well not the most horrific, but the additional horrific thing was that a lot of brands who were manufacturing there didn't actually even realize manufacturing. Yeah. And so the this kind of idea of supply chain and transparency are kind of so interlinked. Um, and uh, you know, and again, our approach and what we think should be the general approach of the industry is not just simply transparency for transparency's sake, but transparency is there because it helps you understand how to have a better impact and how to have more control, right? So you can make better decisions. And so knowing these things, as we then looked at a traditional knitware supply chain and um started to do a real deep gate dive basically into where where the problems and where the impact is. Um, Michael, my co-founder, comes from a highly analytical background. He was in the fintech business, he was uh um uh working in finance for years, so he's highly analytical. Um, and so and the benefit of him also was the fact that he didn't actually come from a fashion background. So he approached this with a very, very different mindset. It was kind of an analytical problem to solve rather than something that was slightly um colored by any previous experience. So it's someone who's coming, someone who's really coming at it kind of very fresh-eyed and was asking questions that were kind of actually pretty obvious, going like, why did why does it happen like this? Why does it have to happen like this? Um and he was able to ask these questions again because he wasn't necessarily so ingrained in the film industry. And so we looked at the kind of again the the traditional knitware supply chain and started to analyze where the most amount of impact comes from. And in the case of knitware, um there's a bunch of materials out there for which it's made from. Um there's synthetics and then there's the natural natural fibers. Now, in a synthetic supply chain, obviously the the real problem with synthetics, as we all know, is that it's all non-biodegradable fibers, um, microplastic pollution, it's all petroleum-based. So that supply chain already, if you look at it from the if you were to think about using synthetics, already highly problematic, right? To use any any of those types of materials because of all those reasons. So we very quickly focused on the natural and natural fiber-focused supply chain. Um, and for knitware, we then looked at the materials that are then used. And wool and cashmere are really the the kind of like at the top, and especially merino wool and cashmere. Um, now looking at both those fibers, we did a again a kind of really started to kind of dig under the surface basically to what makes the better fibre. Now, merino wool and cashmere both, you can make amazing garments out of it, incredibly soft. In the case of merino wool, it's also very good at temperature regulating, has a lot of amazing um uh kind of um technical qualities to it. Kashmir, very soft, obviously notoriously very luxurious. However, both of them are 100% biodegradable, so they are natural fibers that don't leave any impact after kind of like after life is done. Um, however, the real issue with cashmere is that you simply need a hell of a lot of goats to make cashmere. And on top of that, cashmere um it's just very environmentally damaging. Um, what's happening in Mongolia? There's a huge amount of over farming happening with cashmere. So actually, this idea of responsible and kind of like and um positively sourced cashmere, it's actually very hard to justify. Um, on the other hand, if you look at merino wool, which comes obviously from from farming and from sheep farming, there equally you have a huge problem because it comes from sheep who create a huge amount of methane, and we all know that methane is responsible for a massive amount of um carbon impact and carbon pollution. So they both kind of obviously had their benefits and they both had their negatives. Um, however, when we started to go deeper into the merino wool side of it and started to look at kind of farming techniques and what what farms were, a couple of farms were starting to move into, we then kind of started to unpack actually that there was this new way of farming that was kind of emerging called regenerative farming, which a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with, which is a kind of different way.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Give us a little bit, can I drill down on that just for the for the people that haven't heard that term before?

SPEAKER_00 10:17

So, in a kind of like in a traditional kind of industrial farm, basically, what you do is you tend to keep all your livestock on um, you know, on in a single kind of area. Um, and what tends to then happen is the soil gets very dug up by the livestock, and any carbon that is kind of held by the soil gets released into the atmosphere. And that mixed with the fact that they don't then have a lot of biodiversity on uh at those types of farms, it's all a lot of kind of monocrop culture, so it's livestock with monocrops, you simply don't have a lot of carbon sequestration happening. There's simply no opportunity for it. So the impact that you have, the balance of the impact of the farm, is high because what happens is you get a lot of methane output from the sheep, the carbon is releasing, it's the soil is releasing carbon. So there is simply a hell of a lot of impact happening at source. That means actually that if you get from a kind of traditional sheep farm, if you source wool from it, you can have as much up as um 30 kilograms of CO2 equivalent impact um for a kilogram of wool at source. So it's a huge amount of impact to source a kilogram of wool. And that is is also simply kind of unsustainable, basically, for our planet. However, if you do regenerative farming techniques, um, which is a mixture of kind of innovation and actually old techniques, it's a lot about rotational grazing. So you move around the livestock a lot, which allows the soil to recover. You do a lot of kind of crop cover, so you make sure that there's um a lot a lot of growing of different types of plants, um, and the real focus on kind of biodiversity. So you really make sure that you're planting a lot of different types of um cover, basically. And through that whole process, and also because the farms that we actually also source wool from in New Zealand um have huge areas that they're that they're farming across, there is a lot of carbon sequestration happening. So there's a hell of a lot of tree planting, and again, they let the soil rest. That means that the soil holds a lot of the carbon and a lot of movement of the livestock. Now, what that means is very specifically, the farms that we use and we kind of compare to a traditional supply chain, we didn't approach manufacturer first. We actually started at the raw material stage, right? So we started to kind of focus on where do we get our raw materials from and then solve the problem going upwards towards the manufacturer rather than directly dealing with the manufacturer. But we then, through this raw material kind of approach on raw materials, approached these regenerative farms in New Zealand, um, very specific farms that were, I suppose, at the forefront, not only of the regenerative, it's uh weren't only regenerative farms, but were also at the forefront of real innovation in that space. Um, and we approached um in total kind of three farms that we felt met the criteria that we wanted to source wool from them. And we then did a long process of understanding impacts. We did kind of satellite mapping of their ground, and we sent um research kind of researchers from the universities in in Auckland to go and kind of map the map the land and make sure that we understood really what type of impact was happening. So, how much sequestration was there happening, and then how much actual output of methane and you know, kind of farming from farming activities, what was actually happening, and then what was that balance? And through working with those three farms in particular, we worked out that we were actually able to source wool for a kilogram of wool that we would source from there actually sequesters minus 14 kilograms of CO2 out source, which was of course a great starting point for us because it meant that we could actually source this great material, but it had a carbon negative impact. So for every kilogram of wool, we were actually sequestering CO2 rather than again adding to the kind of like adding to the problem. Um, and so that was kind of like for us, that was the big piece to solve was that that kind of getting starting with that kind of negative carbon balance. Um, and on top of that, also, of course, to uh to mention is that our garments are very soft and you know, they've very um uh very small micron count, which means that they wear very well against the skin and they feel ultra luxurious, they feel kind of cashmere soft in their feel. But on top of that, again, they come from these farms that have a far more kind of positive impact. Um, and then for us having kind of almost like solved that part of the problem, it was then a connect the dots exercise through the rest of the supply chain. So we took the raw material, we spin it in Italy, um, in the first B Corp registered textile mill in Italy, um, using only renewable energy. And then we make sure that um in the dyeing process, all the waters basically exit the factory cleaner than even than they went into the factory. Um, and then we manufacture using um manufacture using uh renewable energy also in Europe. So through that whole kind of process, we were able to create a supply chain that again had a net balance that was carbon negative. Um and that's not through buying offsets or any kind of uh you know, kind of any type of uh buying carbon credit program, it is actually through natural occurrence within the supply chain. And also what's important to add, um, because this is the the question that um understandably always gets asked, is like, well, if you're sourcing wool in New Zealand and then you're spinning it in Italy, like surely there's transport involved, is like that does include the total balance of the carbon impact. So we take transport, we first of all we transport everything by um by sea to make sure that we again minimize impact. Air transport is of course far more impactful. Um, we transport everything by sea. Um, and interestingly enough, actually, transport, if you look at the overall impact in the supply chain, is a far smaller part of the problem than sourcing raw material at a kind of like from a from the wrong farm, as it were. Because again, as I mentioned, uh sourcing a raw material from a traditional wall farm can have anything between 20 and 30 kilograms worth of CO2 impact. Um, transport in our entire supply chain is about a kilogram worth of CO2. So it's you know, it's again something we're always aiming to minimize and we're always solving for it and using different looking at using different transport methods, but actually the real problem lies in a traditional knitware supply chain, normally lies in the kind of at the raw material stage. And so through that whole process, again, we we created this this supply chain that was naturally carbon negative. Um, and then what we did is again with my co-founder very much spearheading this, Michael. Um, he again comes from a kind of mix of fintech tech background. We then also built a um a digital supply chain system. So we built a piece of in our technology, a piece of proprietary tech that we could then um track garments going through the supply chain. So we know exactly where the wall, you know, when the wool was shorn, where the the kind of the wool comes from. We can then register exactly when the wool was spun and when it was processed, and then we can see where it went to, we can see when it was finished, and we can track that digital fingerprint for each and every garment. So it's unique to each garment, of course, because each garment is uniquely handled. Um, and then on top of that, we can also map the kind of the carbon impact at every single stage and that all information we then store um uh internally, and then we also clip a little NFC tag onto all our garments. Um, it's like a little chip like you'd find in your in your credit card, and you can tap your phone on it, and then you can kind of get a whole history of the uh of the garment. You can see again this kind of this journey that it's taken. We also kind of connect you with a sheep on the farm that your sweater's will is from, so we kind of try to make that experience quite fun and engaging. Um, we've now also just released something called a time capsule, where you can add kind of memories to the garments, so you can take pictures of yourselves wearing it, you can kind of log your wares on it. So really trying to kind of imbue story into these garments as well, right? Trying to give it a kind of like a richer, uh kind of a richer provenance, basically. And of course, the idea behind it very much is that you through that kind of like that whole process is that you have these um these these sweaters that um that that you can have and you hopefully will have for a long time, but the story makes it, I suppose, gives it extra emotional weight. Do you know what I mean? And you can start to put extra value onto it. Because of course, what's really important that the most sustainable, as they say, the most sustainable items that you have are the ones that you have obviously for a long time or that you have already in your wardrobe, right? So we really want to make sure that the garments we create both have durability and longevity in their quality and in their design. They're not kind of flippant, fast fashion type of pieces, like they are wardrobe staples. Um, but on top of that, kind of imbuing it with this extra story hopefully gives it additional value, and especially as you start to add time capsule moments to it, you start to give it more value, and therefore, hopefully you keep it for a longer time, and then uh that makes the the the act of owning and wearing it more sustainable as well.

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Brilliant. Well, that's all the time we have on the show this week. Thank you, Ed Chard. I mean I appreciate it. No, listen, look, so much to get into, but um, thank you for walking me through that first and foremost. But getting back to small walk, more of a run, but yeah, no, no, that's it, that's that was a very insightful sprint, and I I was glued. Thank you. But so many things that I wanted to touch upon, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow. You mentioned the story there and having something that you can track. You know, this for me, whenever I buy clothes, I think this is one of the most important things is that you can tell people about the clothes that you're wearing. And I'll just give you two very, very quick stories here. When I was younger, I was queuing up for a nightclub that I didn't want to go into and I was wearing clothes that I had no idea about. I think on the front cover of my hoodie, I was I had something called Old Bony Bastard, right? That was what was on the front of it, might have been a band or an album title. I can't even remember where I got it from. And this guy in front of me quizzed me on it, he goes, Who's old bony bastard? I said, I have no idea. He goes, Well, why are you wearing it? And I said, That's a really good question. Really good question. So I mean, and I've only just thought of that just now. That was probably about 20 odd years ago. But from from then forth, I actually worked in a in an independent fashion shop and I'd always love telling my customers about certain brands that had a story or a certain garment that had something very different about it. And I always go back to uh a brand called um uh the armchair killed my brother Neil, um, is about his this brother of uh an obese guy who died of obesity or you know, uh you know, obese-ridden injuries. He just couldn't get off the couch, he was just watching TV all day. So this is so the the guy set up, the brother of the guy set up a brand and he wrote the whole entire story on the inside of the t-shirt. And so I thought that was really cool. And you just you know, you'd be out at a pub or something, and you they'd go, like, what's that written on your t-shirt? And then you go, Well, actually, this is this is a brand that was set up for another guy who's trying to highlight how we're getting really big in the world and how we need to do something about it. So this that I really dig. I've moved on to other things now, now that I'm in my 40s. I'm now into like uh shirts and where the shirts come from. So I have like uh this is gonna sound a bit braggy, but I had I have shirts that are made by the same shirt maker that made shirts for Roger Moore in James Bond. Um, she's still going, she's you know, she's working in Pall Mao, and they still have screen accurate fabrics from the 70s that they use in the James Bond films. And being a James Bond nut, it's a really cool thing to do when you go to these hookups or conventions and you can just show them the actual fabrics that would have been in die or something like that. So having a story, I think it's so crucial to have a story. I mean, obviously, yours is a lot more honest and a lot more uh important, should I say, than than uh you know, just just showing up with a Roger Moore show. But the idea of having something to tell somebody about and engaging them in clothes is always a really, really good touch point, I think, when it comes to clothes. I think that's one of the most important things.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah, and I think and I think we kind of engineered it that way. Um, listen, of course, it's great to have word of mouth about the brand, but obviously the more you make This element engaging and fun and a talkable story, sorry, a talkable part of the clothing, the more awareness starts to spread as well, right? Because it allows people to start the conversation around, hey, have you seen this? You can trace it back. Did you know it's carbon negative? You know, did you know fashion has this amount of impact? And hopefully that really becomes this kind of word of mouth driver to you know, kind of to bring awareness and to fashion's impacts on the environment. Which again has been the crazy thing where I look back now over um, you know, Sheep Inc. was kind of launched around 2020. And so we're a relatively young business still. And when we started, and when we launched, was obviously just pre-COVID, we're just about to hit COVID. Fashion and its impact were just this was the start where people were starting to kind of talk about the impact it has on the environment and start to say how bad it bad it was. But before that, like fashion really wasn't viewed through that lens, you know, being super harmful. There was, of course, some moments like the Ragnar Plaza disaster. There were people, of course, who were aware, people like Stella McCartney were talking about it. But a general awareness piece on the fashion industry being so harmful, it just wasn't really there, especially when you used to kind of talk about the facts and figures behind it and how it's one of the most damaging industries out there. People just weren't aware. And so it's really amazing. What's been so encouraging, I suppose, is that over the last four or five years, that awareness piece is just ramped up massively. You know, people now are starting to get um uh again kind of more conscious about their about their purchasing habits. They are starting to understand that fashion does have a considerable impact on the environment and on, by the way, and on the livelihood of a lot of people. Um, and so I think that kind of that that shift has been has been encouraging. I mean, nothing is happening quick enough, of course, but it is really encouraging to see that that shift is starting to shape take shape. And it is because to your point, it's like it's this ability for people now to start talking about it and start to tell stories and start to discuss it and for it to become a kind of pub conversation. Um and that's definitely what shifted hugely over the last stretch.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Well, I don't know if we're doing this in schools or if it's on the curriculum, but I always feel like if if we're banging on about the climate so much of the time, it'd be great if we could just get it in on at a level when people will want to understand, like 11-year-old, you know, just get them in front of uh someone like you. I'd like to roll you out in front of someone, in front of a classroom, for example, and go, right, guys, I want to I want to tell you about the clothes that you got today. I want to tell you about the uniform that you're wearing. Um, you know, where are you these clothes coming from? And kind of just get them in there early. Because I think by the time you get these people that are already looking to do YouTube hauls at the age of 18 and going, look what I brought back from HM, it's like, are you are you kind of you've already done it. Now I have to rewire you at the age of 18 rather than having you know an idea of what this is about when you're young and your mind's a sponge. If you can just somehow get all of this information out there at an early age or an earlier age, or are we doing it?

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Yeah, and well, I think so. Encouraging, I mean, it is part of it, it was very much depends on the school. I mean, I've got my son is six and kind of sustainability, it's interesting, like it is far more part of the um, you know, it is far more part of the curriculum. There's far more of an understanding around it. Um, you know, it is starting to come in there, but I agree, like it could be it could be far more. Um, I think the interesting analogy that we are hopefully tracking a bit in the fashion industry is how the food, again, the food industry is still very damaging. I'm not saying any of this is solved, but it the awareness that suddenly came into when you bought food around organic, around, you know, if you're not vegan, around kind of happy chickens laying eggs, you know, all those things started to kind of seep into our buying habits where we, you know, kind of if you had the luxury of being able to afford it, you could start to you started to care about where stuff came from. Um, of course, it's important food is you're putting it into your body. So it's also very much linked to this idea of health and am I absorbing the right thing into me. But you know, that that did happen in the food industry, right? There has that that that shift in kind of buying behavior definitely happened. And I think the fashion industry needs to go through that similar type of shift. There needs to be this understanding that actually this thing that you're putting against your biggest organ, which is your skin, also needs to come from a positive source, you know, and it needs to come from you need to understand where it comes from, and you don't want to be putting anything harmful against your skin. You want to be avoiding kind of microplastic um uh shedding and microplastic pollution. And getting that kind of understanding in there, and you know, for us, part of this like connected to the whole kind of technology piece. So can you hear that in the background? It's okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

I got it.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Yeah. Sorry. Part of this, part of this whole kind of um awareness piece around uh transparency and around the journey, um, is also to kind of, I suppose, hopefully feed a bit this um a moment before you buy something where you start to go, I wonder where that came from, you know, and can I get that answer at this point? And because a lot of it has to come, of course, the onus is on the brands to change. I don't think the onus is necessarily on the consumer, but the consumer has to play its part in it. You know, they have to also start to go, they have to start having that moment of of coming into a shop and and wanting to kind of figure out, find out a bit more about where something comes from, and then understand okay, if you're not giving me this information, then potentially I you know I can make a decision at that point to not buy from it. And then, of course, brands will have to change their ways very quickly if they're being um uh financially penalized for it.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

100%. Well, Ed, I've only got you on for another five or so minutes. I just wanted to touch upon a few things real quick. I first heard of you guys in the credits of a film, and so this must have been a couple of years ago, and I want to say it's like a might have been a Jason Staphen film. Have you have you because I because I reached out to you guys to go, oh, which which which jumper was it in which scene? And and I think it might I I don't know if you guys knew or if they literally just got some stuff from you and you weren't aware that you were in the film. But can you does that ring any bells? Have you have you been in any film?

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Someone someone mentioned yeah, you someone we've been lucky that we've we've been lucky that we've had a couple of really nice um supporters in in in the kind of uh in the film space who have supported us. But someone mentioned the Jason Satan thing, and I have to I have to kind of go back and look at that.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

That would have been me.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

Um yeah. 100%. I'll get to that. I think I think I think yeah, if you could, um I'll have have a look at it because I can't I can't remember to be totally honest.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

No worries. No, I'll I'll backtrack and then uh I'll I'll leave an edit in as well when I find it which one it is, because I I know I wrote it down. Um and lastly, we've got the the new collection out, the wave collection. Can you just give us a little insight into the making of that and um and and what it's what it's all about?

SPEAKER_00 29:00

So yeah, we we've we started very much like with essentials, again, um which is still kind of like what we mainly do basically is kind of really providing amazing wardrobe essentials, kind of blue crew necks, sweaters, hoodies. And we've started to expand very much our design collections as well, which have resonated amazingly in the market, um, really focusing more on kind of the the artistry behind knitwear, so looking at kind of intricate design patterns and um again bringing a bit more art into the design. Um and the wave collection is our spring-summer collection. Um, so it was uh our designer, we've got an amazing in um a designer in-house called Dan, and he was very inspired by kind of the prism of light, so you know, so those kind of light fractures, um, uh white light fractures into different colours, and so we created this. We tell you we called it the solar waves, and that's the wave collection. Um, so it's all the kind of different patterns of lights and the kind of like the yeah, yeah, the beams of lights and that we've now done in the cardigan and in the v-neck vest and in a uh crew neck.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah, it's really eye-catching. It's it's it's looks beautiful. So I encourage people to go online, have a look at the brands themselves, have a look at the garments, I should say, and we'll leave links in the show notes. Uh, Sheepinc.com. We've got that right. Yes. Yeah. Great. And uh again, we'll put all the notes over on menswear style.co.uk. Thank you, Ed Sard. Great talking to you. And I'll uh I'll dig up that email. I know it was I know it was to you guys about Jason Stafham somewhere. I'll I'll find it.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

If you could. We can by the way, um as a as a side note, we can also give you guys a um uh uh a code that you can that you can add. Oh yeah, my set.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Yeah, well uh I'll I'll front that, I'll I'll make sure that goes into the uh into the edit here. That's great, and then we can then people can help themselves to the code. Um thanks, Edson.

SPEAKER_01 30:55

You've been listening to the menswear style podcast. Be sure to head over to menswearstyle.co.uk for more menswear content and email info at menswearstyle.co.uk if you would like to be a future guest on the show. Finally, please help support the show by leaving a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Until next time.