The Fableists
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Little Black Book founder Matt Cooper has teamed up with ad creatives, illustrators, animators and design studio Freytag Anderson to launch a sustainable childrenswear brand, The Fableists.
The brand, which launched today, is part owned by ad agency Brothers and Sisters. It sells a range of eco-friendly children’s clothes and limited edition t-shirts designed by a rolling selection of illustrators. The first collection was designed by Crispin Finn, Anthony Peters, Gregori Saavedra and Saami Viljanto, who were asked to communicate the brand’s message in their own style.
The Fableists’ strap lines are ‘dress responsibly’ and ‘play hard, live forever’. Products are made in India by adult workers without the use of chemicals and are mostly shipped over land and sea to reduce the brand’s carbon footprint. Workers are paid a fair wage, says Cooper, and a percentage of profits will go towards funding charity initiatives and educational programmes in areas where the products are manufactured.
Crispin Finn
Anthony Peters
Cooper came up with the idea around eleven months ago, after visiting India on business. “I had been going back and forth for a couple of years and the thing that bothered me originally was child labour, but that led me to discover how farmers were committing suicide in their thousands because they couldn’t get a good rate for crops. Bad working conditions drove me nuts, so did the amount of chemicals being put into the land and, just as importantly, the chemicals being put into the clothes, that were going back into the wearer’s body,” he says.
“I thought we could change the way things were done and do it in a creative way, using top graphic artists from around the world,” he adds. “The concept really was to get creatives together to create a beautiful brand and make people think about how we dress our kids, making sure no children are involved in the labour.”
Saami Viljanto
Cooper has recruited an impressive line-up to help launch the brand so far: Great Guns will be shooting documentary commercials, The Mill are making animated films for release early next year and promotional imagery (top and above) was shot by Sam Robinson. Steve Scott, Michael Arnold and director Olivier Venturini are also involved; and Cooper is keen to recruit new and relatively unknown illustrators to design t-shirts as well as more established ones. 500 of each design are made – illustrators are paid an upfront fee – and Cooper says products are designed to have “a very punky feel”. A select few will also be made into adult sized t-shirts for grown up fans of the brand.
The Fableists isn’t the first brand to promise fashionable and ethical clothing but it has a distinctive visual identity, designed by Glasgow studio Freytag Anderson. “We’ve worked with Matt on a few projects before,” says studio co-founder Daniel Freytag. “This one really stood out for us as there are so many parts to it: Matt wanted it to be sustainable, responsible and fresh in its approach. We were given pretty much free reign to play with different symbols and come up with a marque that communicates the energy of the brand – rebellious was a word that kept coming up in our discussions, so we wanted to reflect that in the identity,” he adds.
The lightning bolt device has been used online, in print and on packaging and labels. “We wanted to create an immediately recognisable symbol – the bolt can be embossed, foiled, filled or just an outline,” explains Freytag. Acid green was chosen to reflect the brand’s environmental credentials; and business cards and stationery were printed by Glasgow Letterpress on FSC accredited papers.
“We were keen to keep the look quite lo-fi and honest because there are a lot of brands out there that claim to do what The Fableists does, and people are often quite cynical when they hear about a new one,” he says. “We were also keen to do things differently, so we broke grid lines, coupled the green with contrasting greys and white and used a robust typeface [T Star Pro]. It looked quite jarring at first – quite reckless – but I think it works,” he adds.
The Fableists’ playful identity is striking, and should appeal to the children its products are designed for as much as the adults buying them. The brand has some admirable ideals, and will hopefully make a positive difference in communities where money is scarce and child labour is sadly commonplace.
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