Paynter Jacket: Iconic Styles Reimagined

"Im Becky and I’m the Co-Founder of Paynter, alongside my partner, Huw Thomas. We only make jackets, and not very many of them! At Paynter we produce 3 batches of limited edition jackets a year, with just a few hundred pieces in each batch.”

“Our jackets are designed based on iconic and classic jackets that will stand the test of time, like the Chore jacket, or Field jacket. Our first two batches sold out in under 15 minutes, which really surprised us to be honest, so now we’re hard at work making sure the experience is as good as it can be!”

“All our jackets are made to order, to minimise the waste and impact we have on our world. Customers are deeply involved in our design process, they help to choose colours and get involved in the details.”

“It’s important to us because we are obsessed with jackets, and we love people. We feel ridiculously fortunate to make for some amazing people, while educating people on what goes into the process of making a jacket. Our vision is to be the most interesting jacket brand on the planet.”

“For us, this means two things:”

“Sustainability has to be sexy. If it’s not, it won’t be desirable, and if it’s not desirable, no one will want to buy from brands who are creating in a way that’s low waste, low impact and ‘sustainable’. We need sustainable businesses to stay in business, and we need sustainability to be on-trend. But first and foremost, what we make has to be desirable. The worst thing we could do for our planet would be to make more stuff that people don’t want or need.”

“Importantly, it should go without saying that we source from the best mills we can find and cause no unnecessary waste through fabric, buttons or excess stock. This should be an imperative of all businesses starting now, if we have any awareness of the pressure our planet is under. We need and want to keep educating ourselves on our impact on the planet to be able to keep improving. We’re pretty transparent, so we’ll be sharing all our learnings as we keep finding out more.”

“We make to order because we don’t want to create waste. It really is as simple as that. Surplus stock can cripple a business, but more importantly, having too much stuff is crippling our planet. So being mindful of sustainability from those two angles means that making to order was an obvious decision for us.”

“When we were almost ready to launch, and had been sampling our product for over 6 months, we learnt that the fabric we’d decided to use wasn’t made where we thought it had been. We learnt that from asking a lot of questions. It was the same fabric that is used by a lot of brands in our market, but the source wasn’t known.”

“We had two options - launch anyway and improve later, or stop, go back to the drawing board and produce a fabric that we truly know the origin of, and that the origin is a good one.”

“We took the second option - we stopped and went back to the drawing board for another 4 months, and ended up creating a bespoke reverse bull denim with Berto in Italy - which was one of the best decisions we made at the beginning.”

“Branding is everything. It means to clearly inform your customers of your values, why you matter, how their products are made, who makes them, and the industry that we’re all part of but know so little about.”

“Every brand on social media is storytelling every day when they post on Instagram - we’ve got to be doing it, and our customers want deep, rich stories from us, so that’s what we aim for.”

“We are both creatives, so we’d never have had it any other way!”

“So much love and attention goes into the jackets we make, so we couldn’t stop there.”

“We want the experience to be as good as it possibly can be, from the moment our customer purchases to when it lands on their doorstep.”  “So we went for a custom printed paper bag, with custom printed tissue (by noissue) and designed by Chris Delorenzo to wrap our jackets inside. Finished beautifully with a custom sticker, and with a printed annual inside that marks the making of their product - a piece of print that customers will only get if they bought a jacket.”

“Also, I (Becky, co-founder) am obsessed with stickers so I’ve been putting our stickers everywhere since they arrived, from the London Underground to lampposts, notebooks, and my laptop!”

“We’d lusted after noissue’s packaging for a long time. When ordering online it’s great to have a good idea of the colours and quality before ordering. So few packaging companies offer a sample so we found it so helpful to see all the potential packaging ideas on noissue’s instagram page.”  

“It also goes without saying that we have no plastic in our deliveries, so that’s the first step in finding the best packaging for us.”