It's amazing that you're able to integrate your own personal touches into tried and true trends. What is your favorite print you have thought up and how did you conceptualize it?
I love the checkerboard. I thought I would be sick of it by now, but it's still definitely one of my favorite prints. It's just so versatile and easy to wear and easy to mix and match. And then, our next signature print is the Happy Hawaii print, which is the first one we ever launched with. I love that one too. When coming up with prints, for me, it's about thinking of ideas that aren't super digital or detailed. It's very simple — one to two colors. We want to make basics that aren't basic. I want them to be exciting, but I still don't want them to be so difficult for people to wear. Nothing too crazy or out there. All of our collections aren't very seasonal. They're sort of an ongoing project and that's why we'll bring in prints from a few years ago. And then it's just working with what we've got and changing the colors or the scale.
I think the checkerboard print is my favorite too. The brand name “Emma Mulholland on Holiday” alludes to the eternal vacation and your designs surely bring that to life. What is your ideal holiday?
Yeah, the brand definitely was started with the idea of me going on lots of holidays. My ideal holiday would just be somewhere where I can properly switch off, which very rarely happens. Somewhere tropical. I'm learning to surf and my partner's a really good surfer as well. So just somewhere where we could go out the front and into the water — we've done that recently in Hawaii. Just total relaxation. And I love seeing lots about the cultures that we visit and learning about them, and seeing different styles. That's always so inspiring for me — the ways that people dress in different places.
I think that nowadays, we need brands like yours to serve as a beacon of optimism in a world that can be otherwise dark at times. Was this the intention from the start?
Definitely; it was a big part of the intentions. We just never wanted to take ourselves too seriously. And I think part of the brand doing so well during the lockdown was that we had these nice and bright colors in cute prints that people could put on and sort of brighten up their day. I've always loved making people smile with the way they dress — making them feel confident. I feel like a lot of our customers are maybe not super serious high-fashion fans, but they still want something that's exciting and not too far out of reach. That's sort of where the brand stems from. There are so many fashion brands out there — they're amazing brands and so creative, but some are also pretty serious in the sense that it's high fashion and not for everyone. We wanted to have that middle ground where you're excited by it, but not too overwhelmed by price and the level of detail. You don't have to always dry-clean our products or can't ever go out and party in it or anything like that. Our brand ethos is to be a ready-to-wear brand and a very female-run brand. But we do take the fit and the quality and everything else very seriously. We want everything to be really long-lasting and something that you cherish and hold onto for seasons to come.
That seasonal ritual is something that people are starting to shift from because there are so many different sustainable ways that you can produce things and I think people are catching on to these new methods. Can you tell me a bit about how you produce some of your pieces in Bali? Why did you choose that location and how did you connect with people there to run a sustainable textile studio?
We work with all different places. We've worked with Indonesia since I started the brand. They're really close to us in Australia and we've been developing just different techniques with them over a long period of time. This particular manufacturer does our screen printing really well. We're working in Turkey for the denim, and the people we've worked with are so innovative and amazing with the denim. The sustainable practices are wonderful. They invest in renewable energy and environmental protection. As we know, denim can be quite an unsustainable fabric, just due to the cotton, but this factory has some great ways to tread-lightly and not produce a huge amount of waste. We put a lot of research into this process as well. I wanted to make sure we did it right because I feel like when brands say that something's made from recycled materials or something like that — that's great, but if they're still going out and producing 10,000 units of it, then there's still a big waste issue. So our effort has always been to keep the production side small and to only make the demand, not to over produce and be sitting on a lot of stock. Thoughtful production is a huge focus for us. And we're still all learning. But we're really excited to start off with the denim being one-hundred percent organic Indigo wash cotton and made in this really sustainable way, which reduces traditional denim water usage by 90 percent.