Shoreditch Ski Club Offers Eco Outerwear With Attitude

As the former creative director of edgy British brand All Saints, Wil Beedle knows a thing or two about clothing with attitude. His Shoreditch Ski Club outerwear collection looks as good on the slopes of Aspen or Gstaad as it does in the East London neighborhood from which it gets its name.

The label is sustainably made, further setting it apart from many of the ski and apres ski brands. “So many of the brands that celebrate winter and alpine culture, weren’t respecting the environment and weren’t producing sustainable clothes,” said Beedle. “Also, they were doing them in a way where they only made sense in an alpine setting.

“What we wanted to do was create a product that spoke to the cutting edge community of our East London home, and that particularly vibrant intersection of where we live and have worked for so many years, and connect that to a technical performance product that would work on the slopes and also in New York or London as well.

“That’s the initial inspiration, to find something that also had an economy of purposes so one didn’t need to have six different coats,” Beedle added. “One could just find the single piece one would fall in love with and it would work everywhere, from the cutting edge streets of East London to the most aspirational alpine resort.”

Shoreditch’s visual language features hardware and X-stitches, which have a toughness to them. Paired with unique silhouettes, the brand’s head-turning styles have performance baked right in. “We worked hard on that so it’s differentiated, not for having neon colors,” Beedle said.

Shoreditch puffa jackets are made from post-consumer plastic bottles. There’s the equivalent of 10 plastic bottles in every jacket, Beedle said, adding, “There’s no feathers involved, no down. Not only are there 10 plastic bottles in every jacket, the puffas will keep you warm to minus 10 degrees.”

Beedle said the company is very focused on developing the products consciously. “The jersey or cotton is organic and we use recycled bamboo for our leggings,” he said. “We’ve partnered with one of the best tanneries in the world to create recycled leather, which is assembled from post-garment manufacturing. Our shearlings are not farmed for fashion. There’s a commitment to recycled leather, recycled bamboo jersey, and recycled plastic bottles in the puffa jackets.”

Prices range from from less than $1,000 to $3,000, with the majority of the jackets are under $1,000. Most of the shearlings are priced under $2,000 and the recycled leathers are under $1,000.

Are consumers looking for sustainability in outerwear? “I would like to think that they are looking for this, but what we want to do is offer something that’s fully differentiated by design,” Beedle said. “If you were starting a company today, how could you not make it fully sustainable, how could you not make it better. Those are the kind of considerations I had in my mind, when I started to create the project.

“What should the brand look like, what’s our responsibility to doing something that is genuinely differentiated, as versatile as possible, as effective as possible, and to deliver the best possible value to the customer,” Beedle said. “A big part of that is being sustainable but also being visually differentiated, never compromising on the aesthetics and never compromising on that sense of cool, that attitude. Some people are looking for [sustainability]. Other people are just looking for a cool coat.”

Beedle gets inspiration from “the women around me, what they’re wearing and what they’re shopping and what they’re telling me,” he said. “My community is always vocal about what they want and need. Also, as I became more aware of it, and did research, with our expertise in manufacturing for so many years, there were solutions creatively available to us. I think the answers are there, if you want to go and find them.”

A pop-up shop, which tested his theories was so successful, “it sold out immediately,” Beedle said. “People had an appetite for something new. Subsequently, the pickup we’ve had from many of the best stores in the world, tells me that there is still that appetite. When we see models and celebrities that have become loyal fans of the brand, that tells me that we’re on the right track.”

Bella Hadid, Hwang Jon-ho from “Squid Game,” Eva Chen and Karly Kloss are fans, and the list goes on. “What I take from all of those women is they all have very strong identities, they all have a very strong purpose and they all represent different characters. It’s that breadth of appeal that’s reassuring to us as a brand, that we can dress all those women.”

Beedle is a skier, but “not quite as good as I should be,” he said. His collection isn’t functional only on the slopes. More and more he’s noticed an apres ski culture emerging in Europe. “There was the opportunity to do something cooler in that space,” he said. “That’s where the luxury shearlings came into play and a lot of our hybrids came into play as people wanted to wear things in the apres ski context as well, which has now become a huge part of our business.”

Beedle owns a majority of Shoreditch. At the beginning of this year a small funding round brought “a really great mix of angels from the tech fashion world and celebrities as well,” he said. “We have a really amazing small group of supporters and investors.”

The collection is sold at Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Intermix and Neiman Marcus in the U.S., Selfridges and Browns in the U.K., Lane CrawfordCRD.A
in Asia, and Net-a-Porter.

Beedle said a freestanding company-owned store isn’t part of the plan right now. “We have a great top tier of key accounts,” he said. “What we’ve done successfully is several pop-ups. We did a pop-up at Selfridges where we were in the international designer hall next to Prada and Gucci. We did a similar installation with a pop-up at Nordstrom in Manhattan and we currently have one in Seoul, South Korea at Tom Greyhound.

“We like to create that focused moment, that focused installation in a unique way and we’ll continue with stores to do that in interesting ways,” Beedle said. “Permanent retail spaces is not on our to-do list just yet. We feel like we have a lot of other opportunities and exciting projects, but of course, never say never. We just launched our own ecommerce site in October, which has exclusive styles and we’ve seen great traction with that.

“We have a really fantastic agility as a brand,” Beedle said. “We’re still small and nimble. We have an appetite to listen and learn from our customers. We’re certainly exploring any way we can address our customers’ needs. At the moment, we’re advertising organically with the best girls wearing the brand and the top stockiest carrying it.”