In Conversation with Molly Walters, Co-Founder of Taippe: On the Portuguese Textile Industry, Slow-Fashion, and the Creative Collaboration behind Taippellador

What’s your name, where are you from, where are you currently based, and what do you do?

My name is Molly Walters. I am from Dublin and I’m based in Lisbon at the moment. I am a designer and co-founder of Taippe, a Portuguese slow-fashion brand.

How did you get started into fashion design? Where did that desire come from?

I went to NCAD in Dublin. I initially wanted to stay in paint and I didn’t really see myself going into fashion. I never doodled designs. I started mainly studying paint, but I was doing a lot of fashion based electives. So, I was like yolo, I’ll put fashion as my first choice. I didn’t get in but then I got an email a couple weeks later saying someone’s dropped out. I was delighted. 

Then in third year I did an Erasmus in Milan, but ended up failing because my exams were online from covid and in Italian. I had to do a summer internship to pass the course. I had previously made friends with Matilde and she told me she could help me as her family works in the textile industry in Portugal. She got me an internship there. And thank god I did because that’s kind of the start of everything.

What was the internship like, what did it consist of?

I worked in a linear textile company. They import fibres, like wool, cotton and cashmere etc. They just import the fluff and then suddenly it's made into garments. They do everything in one place which is unique. There’s only a few of these companies that do this. Usually different parts of the process are outsourced. It really opened up my eyes.

What happened after the internship?

In my final year I won a bursary competition with a paid internship in London, so I was really lucky that I got a job straight away. As delighted as I was to win the competition and start my career, the fast fashion life just wasn’t for me. I learnt so much in that time and I’m grateful to have seen everything I did.

Would you say there’s more opportunities in fast fashion for young designers?

It depends, I think there are some amazing opportunities and there is more stability working for a large and maybe fast fashion company. Just to get a job in fashion is so hard, it's very competitive. 

I have to ask how the concept of Taippe came about? What made you want to start a clothing brand at such a young age?

Well, you know what, it was like divine timing. When I lived in London, Matilde texted me and said, I’m going to be in London in December, let’s go for dinner. I told her I was struggling and that I wanted to find a job that gave me a bit more meaning. She was about to move to Australia for the same reason. I think she spent just a few months there, working in a glasses shop and brainstorming the whole thing. She came back to Portugal quite soon after with plans to start Taippe. She rang me about it on her layover in Dubai.

I know you touched on Ireland being a difficult place to make a name for yourself, so what was the main driving force behind setting up in Portugal?

The north of Portugal is an incredible textile industry hub in Europe. Anyone that you meet from Porto and up has some connection to the textile industry. It’s huge! Both sides of Matilde's family work in textiles so we had this unique opportunity to learn so much from them, it was amazing. And then less than a year in we decided to make Taippe independent and go out on our own.

How long was Taippe set up before you made the decision to buy it yourselves, and how did that shift of ownership affect your business practices?

It’s been almost two years since we started working on Taippe, it didn't take very long for Matilde to decide she wanted to buy it and own it. We put so much of ourselves into it so it didn't make sense to not have ownership. Due to us not working out of the linear company anymore we have had to rethink some of our processes. For example we have realised that we can't produce new fabric for every single piece now. We have a new collection coming out and it’s with dead stock fabric that was already made in Portugal with natural fibers. It's been hard to restock anything because we have to also make new fabric, not just cut and sew new products. 

So now since we’ve bought it, we’ve had to ask ourselves so many new questions. What works for us? What do people want to see? What does slow-fashion mean to us? Does it mean making something new, making an exact amount with no waste or does it mean going into a warehouse and pulling out an old abandoned roll and repurposing it. We're still figuring out what works best for Taippe.

How would you describe Taippe for someone who is not familiar with the brand? Where did the name come from?

This is actually really cute. So, the name “Taippe” was Matilde’s idea. We initially wanted to make something that was slow fashion, something really considered when it comes to fabric and something that doesn't just pigeonhole into one body type, one person, one type. 

Matilde was like I don't want it to be for any type of person, race, sexuality etc. That’s what led to the name, “Taippe” meaning any type of person. It doesn’t [translate] to “type” in Portuguese, but this is how you would spell it in Portuguese.

How is the workload split between you and your co-founder Matilde, are you predominantly in design for example and is she more on the business side?

Well, everything goes through the two of us. Like we’re on the phone almost all day, every day together. Everything is a mutual decision but we have separate jobs. I’ll make all the technical designs and she goes to the production companies like fabric manufacturers. I also oversee some socials with our social media manager, Isabel. I also do a lot of event planning, which I love! Also Matilde is an admin God, she's so organized. Matilde also does all of the graphic design. We’re actually coming out with socks and just today we were working on the packaging. She just went away and did four beautiful ones and just called me being like, okay, these are your four options. Every single one was amazing.

What does the term sustainability mean to you? I think we’re hearing this word being thrown out a lot almost as a marketing strategy to get people to buy into the idea they’re helping the environment.

We don't really like that word or use it much. I don't think it means that much. That’s why we say slow fashion. You can’t be a clothing brand and pretend that you’re saving the earth because you’re still producing things. We’re so aware of that. Everything is biodegradable because it’s all natural fibres, not even the tag will exist in a couple hundred years. 

We also don't like to overproduce and have waste, always make small quantities, until recently we have never made more than about 50 of anything. Taippellador was the first time we made a little bit more and still the quantities were under a 100. It's a small collection. For me, It's also my responsibility as a consumer to make the right decisions for me and be conscious of what I am buying. 

Taippellador has been described as a “collaboration of friendship”, so where did that friendship begin and how did it ultimately lead to the concept of Taippellador?

Well me and Matilde are best friends and then Greg [owner of Pellador] and Dewey are also best friends. We did a showroom in January of last year for Paris Fashion Week Menswear. I had met Greg before so they came along and we all just clicked. It was magical. I think I made a joke like we should collab. And they responded like we’d love to. We were shocked because at the time they were so much bigger than us, they had about 50,000 followers and we had less than 5,000. They took a big leap working with us!

Honestly even if the collaboration hadn't happened we still would’ve had such a great week with them. We’d have dinner together, go out partying and finish with a Jazz basement. It was like Ratatouille. We eventually had a business meeting and Greg immediately was like the collab has to be called Taippellador. And I wanted Irish tartan and Donegal tweed, they were all kind of the inspiration. We planned all that while we were still in Paris and then literally two weeks later, they came over to Portugal.

Did you use existing fabric from both Taippe and Pellador for the collab?

No, we made all our own fabric. Tartan was non-negotiable from the start, we were all on the same page. Greg and Dewey were also really inspired by the tiles in Portugal. So, it really was just a lot of mutual decisions. What Matilde and I always do first is choose the colours because that puts you in the right direction. We never use more than five colours. We chose two greens, a baby blue, red, and white and put all those colours into the tartan. We knew we wanted to do green as the main colour for Taippellador. We chose the blue as the contrast colour, and the red because we both have it in our logos. We wanted to make sure both brand identities were very clear through this collaboration. 

I find it hard to describe my own process and design. It was all just easy, it came naturally together. A lot of the time it’s not about the “right” decision it’s about making “a” decision and then you just have to go with it. We were just like ok we’re going to do the tartan in green and blue, ok what’s next? Choose something and keep going.

Taippellador obviously centres around Irish heritage and Celtic designs, is the Irish aesthetic easy/hard to introduce into the Portuguese market?

One thing I will say, Irish people support Irish people. Luckily for us, the Portuguese are quite interested in international brands and new styles. Previously we were happy to identify more solely as a Portuguese brand as everything was made here but when we purchased Taippe, we decided to acknowledge the Irish side too . We reframed the thinking because we were like we’ve always been this, an Irish and Portuguese brand. We’ve written a new slogan, which is “Irish design crafted by Portuguese hands”. 

I noticed there were some shipping issues for your Dublin Taippellador pop-up because of strikes in France. How do you handle those high pressure situations as a small business?

We shipped 34 boxes of stock to Dublin about two days after our Lisbon. They all got stuck in France due to the strikes. I never believed they wouldn’t come, I still can't really get over it. We had to turn the Dublin pop-up into a presale event, showing the pieces that we happened to have in our suitcases. We literally took the clothes off our backs that we used for photoshoots and hung them up. So, people could try on the clothes and order online. We even printed out photos of some pieces and stuck them up for people to view which was crazy. We didn’t have a single box of product and still it was a brilliant event.

Taippe recently got stocked in LX factory in Lisbon, how did that come about and would you like to be stocked in Ireland in the future?

Yes, so we have appeared twice at a weekend market event in Lisbon called Impar, the people who run this market invited us to their new store they were opening. They were always impressed with the Taippe stand at the market, they said every time they passed Taippe there was a crowd of people around. It’s been so interesting being sold in a store because stock that might not be favourable online, sells really well in the store. It's important to see garments in person. The goal is definitely is to be stocked in Ireland eventually, maybe somewhere like Brown Thomas when we’ve grown a bit more

Written by Alex Kelleher: (@alex_kelleher_)

Edited by: Niall Carey (@niall.030)