Welcome to Calenion Apparel! I’d first like to take this opportunity to introduce myself, my name is Tom Green. At the time of writing this, I am a 24 year old self-taught artist from England. Calenion Apparel is a family business creating alternative clothing, largely inspired by tattoo artwork. This story is a little look into how the brand came to be what it is today.
It was towards the end of my time at school that I started to become more interested in art. What started out as simple doodling throughout most of my time there, gradually developed throughout the years into a much more serious and thought out design process. I went through most of school and college not knowing what I wanted to do when I was older. It wasn’t until university that I finally decided to focus on developing my art skills, trying new styles and developing these doodles and scribbles into artwork that could be sold. It was from then on that I knew I wanted to start a clothing brand of my own. So I continued drawing as much as I could through university trying new styles and techniques.
Once I graduated from university, I started straight away to make this dream of starting my own clothing brand a reality. However, as with many things in life, I ran into a few issues right from the start! But I was determined not to let these setbacks prevent me from achieving my goal. I pushed along with setting up the brand, constantly getting closer and closer to launching.
At university I studied Environmental Conservation, and so I have a great love for nature and the protection of it. Because of this, sustainable and environmentally friendly printing methods and packaging were a must for my brand! All the clothing is printed using eco-friendly, bio-degradable and sustainable water based inks. In addition, all the packaging used for the brand is bio-degradable or reusable.
Eventually a few months after my university graduation, it got to the point where everything was ready and I could launch the brand which I was extremely excited about and had been looking forward to for so long. So on February 24th 2020 I opened the website and the response I got was amazing. It felt like everything had finally come together after all the work I put in. The first few weeks went really well, but the situation with coronavirus was getting worse each day and eventually I had to make the tough decision to temporarily close the store for the safety of my family and my customers. By this time the brand had only been live for just under a month.
With not much to do during the lockdown, I took some time to look over the brand as there was the nagging feeling that I wasn’t 100% happy with how I originally launched it. After going back and forth I decided to change the brand up a little bit, viewing my initial launch as a ‘test run’. In the few short weeks Calenion was live, I managed to see what parts of the brand worked and what parts didn’t. This meant I was able to fine-tune certain parts of the brand allowing the end result to be much more focussed. This eventually lead to a re-launch of the brand in May 2020.
This re-launch of Calenion Apparel is a clothing brand I am truly proud of. I have a lot of high hopes and exciting things planned for the future that I can’t wait to share with you, and I hope you are just as excited!