Our Story

When the idea for Wildelore first came to be, I was five months pregnant and feeling like my options for maternity clothes involved excessive amounts of frills, lace, and lines. As my usual wardrobe includes simple tops, sweaters, and basic jeans, I wasn't exactly thrilled.

I also wanted to go hiking, and the cotton maternity shirts I did buy just didn't hold up. They were damp, droopy, and far from ideal. When I searched for the maternity section at my favourite outdoor stores, I was shocked to find they didn't actually exist!

Fast forward to when my daughter was born and I began nursing her; I was disappointed to realize that the clothes I did buy during pregnancy didn't double function for nursing. The last thing I wanted to do as a new mom was go shopping, and much to my dismay, there was nothing for me and my active outdoor lifestyle - though there were dresses galore!

At some point during my postpartum journey I tried to fit back into my old jeans, and when that didn't happen, I began to feel like I needed four wardrobes - one for pre-pregnancy, one for maternity, one for nursing, and one for postpartum/in between sizes. 

Then while cross country skiing with my little one, unzipping my jacket, and hiking up my layers and getting cold in order to nurse, I thought, "there must be a better way!"

The lightbulb just kept going off. And so, my research began.

I started asking other moms and moms-to-be about their experiences with maternity/nursing clothes, and, if they felt similarly or not.

It turns out that I was far from alone! With my husband on board, we decided to explore further along the process.

The Birth of Wildelore

Truthfully, it started with a few thrift store sweaters, a pair of scissors and some "Frankenstein" experimentation. We bought zippers and asked a seamstress friend of ours to sew them in for us. We were able to get a sense of what we were looking for, and to roughly approximate the vision, but the result was not the most inspiring aesthetically. 

Having had zero prior experience in the apparel industry (we met in music school after all), we reached out to a local mom who we knew worked in fashion. She was kind enough to meet with us (thank you so much for all of your help along the way Annika!) and directed us towards some helpful resources.

I enrolled in a course about starting a clothing line, and learned the very basics involved in how to go about getting a pattern made, tech packs, creating manufacturing relationships, what to look out for, fabric sourcing and so on.

From there, we were introduced to Apparelmark in Vancouver, and Cara - who would ultimately become our designer. 

The professionalism of Cara and her team instantly spoke to us. Cara's experience working with brands like Arc'teryx, Lululemon, Aritzia, Outdoor Voices and more instilled such a deep level of confidence and trust in her ability to bring our vision to life. We knew she was the one, so we took the leap and decided to work with them! 

The Design Process + Beginning of the Brand

Over the next year, we worked alongside Cara creating and refining the design of our first offering (the All Phases Fleece) + developing prototypes. Beginning in February through August 2022, we received and adjusted 3 prototypes, testing them out in the wild, and eventually, included the 2nd and 3rd prototypes in a photoshoot + our crowdfunding video.

Throughout all of this we were busy selecting fabric, testing colours (called dips), working with a lovely designer to create what would become the wildflower print, experimenting with zippers, and meeting almost weekly with Apparelmark (via Zoom) to capture changes and approve or reject samples/prototypes, designing the neck tags, and overall, being quite a difficult client. 

We will be the first to admit that we were challenging to work with in the sense that we really wouldn't budge on our quality requirements and were always opting for top notch finishes/manufacturing which slowed down the process some. Also being new too the industry, Chas and I had our own learnings to do about how the process works and we asked a lot of questions! 

During this time we came up with our brand name which was a long and ongoing process. I also wrote a massive business plan as part of a Community program which I had to submit in order to qualify for a part time "self-employment" wage for 9 months (thank you Community Futures!). We also began receiving mentoring from local Apparel company, Ambler (Christian and Jackie have been absolutely so helpful).

In January 2022 we launched our Instagram page, and shared about the journey there, asking questions to our audience about which pattern design they liked best, which colours they wanted, and each prototype was shared on Stories. 

The following month I dropped the sweater off to a few local women with a feedback form and met some lovely new mamas this way. We even sent the very 1st prototype to 5 outdoor loving women in the United States for feedback and called it The Sisterhood Traveling Fleece! They hand signed a notebook and shared a little bit about themselves before passing it along to the next recipient. 

The next October we received our Size Run (each size of our line XS-XXL) and were lucky enough to have 20 women over to our house to try on various sizes. Some women had never met us before but volunteered to help us! We took photos and measured them, and used the information to fine tune our sizing. 

After we had all the data, Chas and I did our very best to make adjustments. Think, 1/4" off the sleeves, 1" off the length, slightly smaller armhole, different pocket bag to solve a visual issue and so on. It was foreign territory to us, but after staring at numbers and photos for a week straight, we eventually got there! 

Next came an extra "size run" to reflect the changes, in 1 size. 

A Scary Learning Opportunity

We count our lucky stars for this moment as the sweater arrived in the custom green fleece we had triggered the order of 3 months prior, but it was different. The fleece was thinner, the colour just slightly off, and the hand feel/pill of the material was not what we had approved. 

I'm going to be writing a blog post about this scary moment, and will link it here when it is finished. 

Ultimately, we stood by our commitment to quality even though redoing the fabric meant a delayed manufacturing date and also forced us to air freight the sweaters instead of shipping via boat (much more expensive by 3x). 

Launch Planning & Putting Ourselves Out There

During one of our meetings with Christian (our mentor from Ambler) where we were discussing launch strategy ideas, he mentioned a book called Crowdfunded that a friend of his lent him.

I borrowed it from him and something clicked. I devoured it quickly and told Chas that I felt this method was the way for us.

After all - just for some perspective...when we first had discussions with Christian, we were trying to figure out how we were going to sell 50 sweaters in our launch month. 

This was based off of a Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) of 600 sweaters TOTAL. 

Fast forward to the new conversation after months of development and changing factories, and we were now looking at a Minimum Order Quantity of 1,200!

The financial investment was already scary at 600, and now that it had doubled, we were really feeling the need to have a good strategy.  

Crowdfunding As The Path

Generally, crowdfunding campaigns serve as a means to fund the manufacturing of a product that has been prototyped/sampled. 

However, in our case, due very long lead times in the fabric making process, as well as the time-sensitivity of our product offering (women would have their heart set on using the sweater during pregnancy or new motherhood even though the garment is for before, during & after), we had to place our Product Order (PO) well in advance of our crowdfunding campaign. Six months prior to be exact!

Crowdfunding was a great pathway for us because by creating a list of VIPS and allowing them to have first-access to our campaign + first dibs at size and colour selection, this allowed us to gather what in the business world is called "early validation". 

So even though no one actually purchased/pre-ordered a sweater until the following January, we could at least relax a tiny bit about investing our life's savings, because we began running ads in August, people also began putting $1 down, which meant that people were interested and willing to use their credit card to get access to our product launch. 

This went a long way for Chas and I as business owners and as a couple! Since we had been working on the business for well over a year at this point without even having a product ready to sell just yet, this was stressful at times. The uncertainty of whether or not we were out to lunch or truly on to something was taxing on us.

Pre-Launch + Kickstarter Campaign

With the help of the LaunchBoom accelerator program, we tested ads and built the structure of what would become our Kickstarter campaign. Landing pages, email flows, and all of the content that would be used on our actual campaign page. 

We had a photoshoot (thank you to all our models and friends!), and hired a wonderful local couple/design studio to bring our crowdfunding video to life (thank you May and Alex!). 

6 months after beginning to advertise, we launched our campaign and closed 30 days later at $124,000 raised with 820 backers. We were thrilled! 

At the same time the campaign ended, the final Top of Production sweater samples arrived at our house. This meant that the the 1,200 sweaters would be exiting the factory the same week!

Shipping Prep + Delivery

1.5 months later we prepared our thank you cards and letters (I hand signed and Chas hand stuck stickers to 1,500 of them!), and sent them off to our fulfillment centre in Vancouver. 

The week of April 3-7 2023 close to 900 sweaters were shipped! 

The week of April 10th 2023 the All Phases Fleece began to arrive all across Canada, the US and to a few international destinations as well. 

Reviews + Store Launch

The reviews are trickling in and it they are truly something else to read. Knowing that all our decisions paid off in a very high-quality garment that helps women to get outside during motherhood is an incredible feeling.

To have our first orders via our website is yet another milestone.

Where We Are Going

We are so thankful to everyone who backed our campaign and supported us here at Wildelore! We couldn't have done it without our founders! 

Though we are very much focused on what is happening now, we are also working to develop 3 new products to add to our shop!

I'll be sharing about this in our newsletter + over on Instagram, so if you're interested in seeing what we're up to, as well as contributing your feedback when the time comes, I'd love to see you there.

It has been almost 3 years now that we've been working on Wildelore (I say we because my husband has been super involved in the design process + logistics as well), and we're excited to see what the future holds!

Thank you for being here.

Please join our newsletter for more of a inside scoop, and don't forget to find us over on Instagram too!