And so it begins....

"you're not a very good salesman, but you have a certain something that I don't. I think we could work together!" So blared out Mike at 1.30am after a long night of Guinness at Kyatt's in Brighton.


So, in this land of opportunity, what to do. That was the question that Mike and I were mulling over a bottle of wine at the Brown Cow in Brighton on a cold wintery night in July. What we did decide was that it had to be fun, and it had to share our values.


2 weeks later Mike had an idea. We had both been moaning about the lack of classic casual clothes in Australia for men. This is not to say that the clothes here are crap, they are generally very well made, but there was a gap where a number of successful brands operate in the UK. It was either Billabong, Country Road or Katmandu. Part of the procedure of going back to the UK for all the ex-pats is to fill an additional suitcase full of clothes that just are not available in Aus. So the Idea was to open a store and resell all these brands to an audience that was interested. Unfortunately this idea faltered at the first hurdle. None of the brands wanted to sell to us, in fact none of the brands even returned e-mails or phone calls.


Change of plan time. Having read the story of how one of the more successful UK brands started, we decided that perhaps we could do something similar. Design a couple of classic pieces of clothing that are modelled on friends favourite items, source the material, have them made up and then sell them direct to the public. Build a brand from scratch with similar ideals to what Mike, Amanda, Juliet and I hold dear.


Firstly name for brand. That actually was easy. Mike came up with Larrikin. A fabulous ausie word meaning:


"Larrikinism is the name given to the Australian folk tradition of irreverence, mockery of authority and disregard for rigid norms of propriety. Larrikinism can also be associated with self-deprecating humour"


which appealed to both of us. Unfortunately and quite obviously Larrikin.com etc were taken, so plan B: Larrykin. This didn't fly that well, as we didn't want to get mixed up with a TV personality. Finally Larrakin was born. Websites were free and trade marks were available. 


Next job, Logo. Commissioned a graphic designer to come up with some with a clear brief about what we wanted the brand to stand for. These are the first efforts:

There were some good ideas here, and we liked the handstand. So the next batch looked like this:

Which became:

And finally

Meanwhile we had asked the people we had contracted to start the clothing design work to do a logo and they came up with these:

We debated the handstand vs these vigorously, and initally thought Ned looked a winner. However female reaction was mixed and it was perceived to be very male. So we asked for the man to be developed and got these:

We were nearly there, and with a final push we got to the final logo set and to cap it all off our font is called Year2000Boogie!

We are very happy with these now. The icon works as well with the name as it does on its own. It is highly memorable and a bit cheeky. We love it.

Obviously we wanted to make sure that it stood out with all the other brands in the market place, so I put the following together and we think it holds its own in some very prestigious company. Now all we have to do is make some damn clothes!