How did we get here?
That’s a very deep question for a rainy Thursday in Scotland. We’re not having an existential crisis here at the studio, we just thought we’d share a bit of our story and how Ragman Collective came to be.
For context, Ragman Collective was started by Victoria & Luke, married for a good few years, former furniture makers, Horticulturists and Santa’s little helpers. So how did you get to clothes? Simple if a little random.
We both love to ski, so in 2023 we chucked the dogs in the car and headed off for a few days in the mountains. Little did we know how much this trip would change our lives.
It was the most undramatic fall ever, Nothing catastrophic, no real drama, it wasn’t flailing legs hurtling down an Olympic style slalom course. It was a little slip on the way into a restaurant for a lunchtime beer. Apparently that’s enough to rupture an ACL and every other ligament and tendon in the knee! It didn’t even hurt that much, we still had the beer!
Over the course of a lovely Croque Monsieur and a Bier Blonde the knee in question, lovely and shapely before lunch, swelled to the size of a grapefruit and “Blob-knee” was born.
We’ll skip the dull bits with French hospitals (“you have strong legs, the x-ray doesn’t show much”), re-arranged ferries (missed because the car went into limp mode 300 miles from Calais), private MRI scans (“How much??) and Orthopaedic Consultants (“The entire All-Black front row only has 1 ACL between them” If you know, you know).
After that we got back to the reality of life and our day job building heavy wooden furniture, Blob-knee simply wasn’t up to it. It’s not many people who get to sack their own spouse but if you ever get the chance we thoroughly recommend it.
So what to do next? Like most people we had a bag full of clothes in the back of the wardrobe waiting to be listed on vinted, but we never seemed to have the time or patience to list them. Well, now we did! So that went online and started selling quite well, then came the inevitable spring clean. All of the bits we realised we hadn’t worn for over a year (or even seen in some cases) were listed too. And they sold! So we then helped clear Victoria’s parents old clothes, then our friend Laura’s clothes… word got around.
Things snowballed from there and it became a fully-fledged business Then comes the problem of how to keep track of hundreds of items from Danni, Nic and Auntie Jackie’s sisters brothers boy? We only had so many fingers and toes so eventually Spreadsheets replaced notebooks and scraps of paper became extinct much to Victoria's chagrin. Now we have slightly more complex software that we didn’t even know existed when we started.
We’ve moved from our kitchen table, through the garage at home and now into an office with pink office chairs, houseplants, its own laundry although we draw the line at a break out room with sofas and Ping-Pong.