Everything here is designed in Melbourne, in small runs.
And because everyone asks: who's Sam? During lockdown, Scarlet had a crochet top made for her birthday by a girl called Sam she'd met through Instagram. She posted it, everyone wanted one, and the two of them ended up making a tiny crochet collection together. That was the very beginning of Scarlet & Sam.
The brand eventually grew beyond crochet, Sam moved on, and Scarlet kept going. We kept the name because, honestly, Scarlet & Scarlet doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Our small but amazing team (Ebony, Chloe, Laura, Adriana, Maggie, Steph & Katrina) operates out of a very cute converted warehouse in Melbourne. We don't really want to get much bigger than this. We like being a tight-knit team where everyone knows what's going on, ideas happen quickly, and very little requires a meeting about a meeting.
Before this, Scarlet spent years running an online vintage store — sourcing clothes, obsessing over silhouettes and slowly working out what people actually came back for.
Scarlet & Sam started with crochet, but the piece that really shaped what the brand became was the Capsule Bomber.
We wanted a bomber that didn't exist yet, so we made it the way we wanted it, in a small run because a small run was all we could afford. It sold out. We made something else. That sold out too. And that basically became the business model. We've just got a bit better at it.
There are nine colourways of that Bomber now. Bone, Chocolate, Khaki, Navy, Silver, Charcoal, Plum, Baby Blue and Black. We definitely didn't plan that. You guys just kept asking for another one.
The look. Vintage inspired, 90s through the cut, and comfortable enough that you forget you're wearing it. That last part isn't a throwaway line, it's the actual brief. If a piece isn't wearable all day, it doesn't get made.
There's another, less official test: Scarlet has to actually want to wear it. A suspicious number of our bestsellers started with her wanting something she couldn't find anywhere else.
How we make things. In small runs. Not as a marketing thing, although we know how it sounds. We don't have a warehouse full of stock and we've never wanted one. We make a number we think is right, sell it in a drop, and only sometimes restock it.
When we get it wrong, it's almost always by making too few, which is annoying for everyone, us included.
We rarely do sales. No end of season, no 20% off weekend, no codes floating around on a voucher site.
Two reasons. It isn't fair on the girlies who paid full price six weeks ago — and a lot of you did. And we'd rather make less of something and sell all of it than make too much and mark it down.
So the price you see is the price. Except for the occasional members-only sale 👀
Most of these photos were taken on a phone. Usually in the middle of doing something else — visiting our suppliers in China, during a meeting at the office, walking down the street, wherever we happen to be.
We've tried the other way, with the proper photographers in the proper cities, and it came out looking like everyone else's proper shoots. So we stopped.
S&S Insiders. There's a private Instagram channel with around 7,000 of you in it, and drops open there an hour before they open to everyone else.
That hour is when a lot of a drop goes. If you've ever wondered how somebody got the size you wanted, that's probably how.
What we're into, in case it explains the clothes. Vintage. 90s everything. Natural wine and the kind of bar with six things on the menu. Bakeries. Coffee worth the walk. Scandi rooms with too much light and a table outside. Marion and Florian, if you're in Melbourne. There's a gelbell piece on our office wall.
It's all the same taste, really. We just make clothes out of it.
Thank you, genuinely. What started as a tiny crochet collection during lockdown somehow turned into this.
Almost 100,000 of you now own something of ours, and around 40% of you are outside Australia, which still feels slightly wild to us.
We read your Instagram DMs. We answer most of them. We notice what you're wearing, what you're asking us to bring back and what you wish we'd make next. And we change things because of you more often than we probably admit.
We want Scarlet & Sam to grow, but we want to do it our way. Small team, small runs, making things we actually want to wear and hopefully staying nimble enough to change our minds when we have a better idea.
Protecting what makes S&S feel like S&S matters more to us than getting big for the sake of getting big.
Anyway. Thanks for being here. <3
Love,
Scarlet & the Team
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