I spent 4 years in Hong Kong trading companies learning the mechanics of the critical path, how a product moves from design through to production to container. Designers often didn’t have time to come up with anything radically new for the many collection drops during the year, and much work was copied from other brands found in the same showroom with just a few small changes made. It was a useful education. I grew tired of the relentless collection cycles, the constant use of new materials to make the same things, and of watching “inspiration” become a polite word for copying whatever someone found on a shopping trip to copy and make more of.
I wanted to build something different. Together with a Malaysian friend from college, we started a business addressing the three P’s: people, planet, and profit.
We’d both grown up seeing traditional patchwork mats across Southeast Asia, the kind assembled from bits of scrap fabric folded the same way and stitched together in concentric circles. I took one apart, simplified stitching the folded bits into a trim we could sell by the meter, and started teaching the technique to handcrafting groups. One of the first was a group of teenagers in a Vietnam orphanage.
The harder question came next: how do you take a long story like that and make it work for a global market without flattening it? And how were we going to make it into contemporary fashion products?
Our answer was to split the process. One part stayed recycled and handmade, the part that carried the skill and the story. The other part moved into a factory for professional finishing. Being based in Hong Kong gave us the infrastructure to do both at once: artisan work integrated within export quality manufacturing on the other.
That is how Dialog Worldbutik was born. It went on to sell collections to ASOS, Anthropologie and a range of boutiques across Japan and the UK. We were at the cusp of a new wave where buyers began to be more open about limited edition runs where all items may not be exactly the same.
The variation wasn’t a manufacturing flaw to hide, it was the proof that a person, had made it and that recycled materials have a place in wholesale manufacturing.