Interview: Wicklewood

Wicklewood

text by Karolina Barnes, photography provided by Caroline Downing Nadel

1. What has been your journey so far? How did you get to where you are now.

Fabrics and design have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was ten years old, my mother, Liz Downing, and her business partner Anne Dubbs, founded Blithfield, a London based fabric and wallpaper company. I grew up in London surrounded by antique documents, fabric cuttings and wallpaper samples and spent many weekends and holidays helping out at trade shows and in the Blithfield sampling department! Blithfield taught me how to modernize classic designs, play with colour and scale, and the importance of textiles in a home. It became clear early on that I wanted to follow in Blithfield’s footsteps. Their entrepreneurial spirit was contagious.

I moved to the states for university where I studied history at Yale. Afterwards, I lived in NY for five years, working in fashion and then returned to London in 2015 to start working on Wicklewood! Through the many times I moved in my twenties, and the numerous rental flats which I've decorated, I had become frustrated by the lack of affordable and original design options that can change with each season, mood or move and so, I launched Wicklewood to make interior design easy.

“Blithfield taught me how to modernize classic designs, play with colour and scale, and the importance of textiles in a home.”

2. How is Wicklewood different from other brands?

We design for the modern nomad, and help you shop that way too. We carefully curate room sets, which include a variety of bold designs in complimentary colours that will spruce up any room. With an area rug anchoring each collection, we add in cushions and throws in different schemes guaranteed to brings the colours of the world to your home with ethically produced artisanal fabrics and designs that will brighten up your home.

Wicklewood is also unique as it is inspired by three generations of women in my family passionate about textiles, design and individuality. Our designs are influenced by classic weaving motifs from the archives of my great, great grandmother, the renowned Guatemalan textile collector Lilly De Jongh Osborne, the colourful designs of the iconic fabric and wallpaper company, Blithfield founded by my mother, Elizabeth Downing and Anne Dubbs, and my own personal experiences traveling and moving from home to home.

(A little more about my Great Great Grandmother or ‘Mamita’ as she used to be known…) My great, great grandmother, Lilly De Jongh Osborne was a prolific collector of textiles and crafts from Central America in the 1930s. Lilly was a Dutch woman raised in Costa Rica. She had a love of meeting new people, a distaste for ladies’ luncheons and a fascination with Guatemalan traditions and culture. Lilly spent her days traveling on horseback through the highlands and exchanging new textiles with old. She carefully documented her discoveries and dedicated decades to becoming a pioneer collector, writer and lecturer. I grew up hearing her legendary stories and surrounded by the motifs, colours and designs from her archives — one of the world’s largest of Guatemalan textiles. All of this inspired and formed the foundations for the inaugural Wicklewood collections.

3. What is your mission with Wicklewood?

To make interior design easy. Like me, people are moving around the corner or around the world more frequently than ever before but still seek a space that reflects their individual style, so Wicklewood set out to create a “Home for the Modern Nomad.” We make decorating easy by offering carefully curated room sets, featuring four design essentials that will instantly transform a home with distinct decor. Our cushions, rugs, quilts and one-of-a-kind accent pieces are small enough to move easily and bold enough to make an impact, harnessing the power of colour and pattern to brighten up a home.

4. How important is ethical trading to you and Wicklewood?

Very! First fashion was in the spotlight for the lack of ethical trading across the mass-produced products and now it’s time people start thinking about where their interiors come from too. Our products are ethically produced globally, from Guatemala, to India and back to the U.K. We design our collection in our studio in London and work with expert artisans around the world who use classic textile techniques to bring our designs to life. We work with a women’s cooperative in Guatemala, who weave ikats on backstrap looms, craftspeople in India, who hand block print our quilts and hand weave our rugs and women in the U.K., who turn our fabrics into beautiful final products.

5. Can you tell us more about the challenges you had to overcome when setting up Wicklewood?

Working with people around the world is incredibly rewarding but challenging at times. Our products are handmade by artisans in parts of the world that are often affected by adverse weather patterns and so delays can occur which can affect our lead times, something we have had to learn to plan for to avoid any delivery issues down the line.

Being a small independent business with high ethical standards means products are handmade and not mass-produced. The artisans that we work with are compensated for their unique skill, which makes it harder to compete with high street brand prices. And so, from the start we have built a brand that attracts people who are interested in the craft and the story behind the brand and understand the value of our products.

“We have built a brand that attracts people who are interested in the craft and the story behind the brand.”

6. What are your biggest lessons learnt so far in terms of what you’ve learnt on the way - businesswise and ethicalwise.

Diversification – don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This lesson can be applied to multiple aspects of the business – whether it is the products we have chosen to make, the people we have selected to work with or the team that you surround yourself with every day.

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