Jericho Road Clothing
“The main focus for our pieces from the beginning is to always have bold prints but on really simple styles. We find it's a safe combination and people seem to love it!" Kate Russell and Chloe Rowe, Co-founders and designers
By noissue — 21 August, 2018
We are two country girls (sisters) who grew up in Central West Queensland on a 50,000-acre cattle property. We both moved to 'the big smoke' (a.k.a Brisbane) when we finished school and went to university to study education. We've always had this crazy love for fashion, but we never really knew where to take it. During uni, we'd buy old jeans from op shops and turn them into cut-offs and take them to a market in the city to sell. It became quite a successful side business for us. We'd always toyed with the idea of printing our own design onto a dress, and after a few trips to Hong Kong we thought we'd take the plunge and manufacture our first ever Arizona shift dress, now iconic to our label. We had to order 100 pieces as that was the MOQ for the fabulous factory we found, so we started an Instagram page and a pre-sale to pay for it all. Guess what?? We sold out! To be honest, the rest is history.
We draw most of our inspiration from our home in Blackall, and you'll see it on majority of our clothes; cacti, ghost gums, cockatoos, brolgas and sunsets. The main focus for our pieces from the beginning was to always have bold prints but on really simple styles. We find it's a safe combination and people seem to love it! More recently, we've started collaborating with other small artists that we've found (mainly through social media) and it's been such a great achievement for our business. It's nice to mix things up and meet other small business people. There's definitely been times during our start-up where we've lost our way and we've made plenty of errors, but it generally only takes a half hour conversation together to get our vision back on track. Our mantra has always been ‘work hard, be kind.’ It's really that simple.
Starting out we didn't have a lot of money, but we never let it bother us. To start with we didn't have much to spend on packaging and all the rest, so we'd spend endless nights decorating our shipping bags by hand with a permanent marker! We do our best to make our brand stand out while still being 'us'. Since growing, we'd like to think we've stepped up our game and now keep our packaging eco-friendly and custom. We'd emailed a lot of different companies to find that their minimum order quantities were in the tens of thousands, something we just couldn't afford to buy. Our tissue from noissue is one of the best things we've found on Instagram! They are environmentally conscious and responsible while still creating a fabulous product that is attainable for small businesses like ours. They make every order we send out look absolutely fabulous and we have so many people comment on it!