Born of a Better Kind of Slow

Anna Wheeler · Founder & Designer

I didn't set out to build a brand. I set out to make something with my hands, for people I loved, during a time when that felt like the most honest and caring thing I could do.

i. Before any of this

Before any of this, I had an established career that I’d worked towards for years, following my passion for textile design. After studying at the Royal College of Art, I worked as a freelance designer for Missoni, Alexander McQueen, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Whistles, Top Shop and High everyday couture.

I knew the industry well, its rhythms, its pace, the extraordinary distance that can exist between the person who designs the item and the person who eventually wears it. Over 25 years within the industry I had learned a great deal inside the fashion world and had also quietly learned what I didn't want to carry forward.

When lockdown arrived in the spring of 2020, I was living in rural Warwickshire and the company I was working for at the time in Italy had stopped needing designs and I found myself for the first time ever with time on my hands, time to reflect on my life and the fashion industry and how I wanted to work in the future.

ii. The first scarves

I started knitting scarves, but not as a business. I want to be clear about this, because it matters to how I think about everything that came after. These were gifts.Something made slowly and with care and passion, passed on to friends and familyduring a period when a handmade item felt like the most direct way of saying: I wasthinking of you. I wanted to make something that would last beyond the moment.

Word spread, the way it does. Friends mentioned them to other friends. People I had never met got in touch to ask if they could buy one. Gradually, and quite surprisingly something began to take shape. Cotswold Knit grew from a gift rather than a strategy. I think that origin matters. It means the brand has always been built around the act of making something well for someone specific, rather than around volume or speed.

Five years on, I no longer knit every piece on my domestic knitting machine in my bedroom. I now own a very large industrial knitting machine and knit small batches of each design on this. It's really special being able to knit production ‘in-house’ myself and I feel so lucky to be able to keep complete control over what I make still, the quality and the amount that's made is still so important to me.

iii. What shaped my eye

I grew up in rural Oxfordshire, surrounded by nature and stunning countryside gardens. My grandmother's kitchen garden is something I come back to often when I try to explain my designs. She grew up on a farm, and the garden was a working one: part necessity, part magic. Vegetables and herbs grew alongside flowers, with no particular regard for where things were supposed to go. Fuchsias lined the borders. Snapdragons moved when you touched them. There was an old greenhouse where I spent whole afternoons as a child, warm and earthy, making mud pies with soil and sieves and plant pots, entirely absorbed. The smell of growing tomatoes. Roses planted entirely for theirscent, not their appearance. Picked and dried for potpourri, their petals soft and silky between small fingers.

What I loved most was the way nothing matched in any arranged sense...a row of carrotsmight appear amongst the flowers, a climbing rose would find its own way up a fence. The garden mixed everything together and it was more beautiful for it...more surprising, more alive.

That is what I am still looking for in a design. The botanical-inspired patterns I create have no set repetition. Each one is built on the understanding that nature doesn't work by formula. There is always more to find, the longer you look.

iv. What I kept

I am sometimes asked whether Cotswold Knit is a reaction against the fashion industry I came from, I really don't see it that way. Those years gave me something I couldn't have built differently: a technical understanding of what a well-made garment actually requires, an instinct for the difference between a yarn chosen for its quality and one chosen for its price, a standard I hold myself to because I have seen what happens when that standard slips.

What I let go of was the pace and the assumption that more is better, that faster is progress, that the distance between a designer and their customer is simply the cost of operating at scale. I didn't believe that then, and I don't believe it now.

What I kept was the craft. And the conviction that slow fashion is not a trend or amarketing position. It is simply what happens when a knitwear designer in the UK decides to make things properly, for people who care where their things come from. Cotswold Knit is an independent British brand built on that conviction.