Longsands was never supposed to become all of this.
There wasn't a grand business plan.
There wasn't a team of investors sitting around a boardroom table discussing market opportunities.
There definitely wasn't a café-bar, a sports bar, a holiday home or anything resembling what Longsands has become today.
There were just a couple of students from the North East, a love of clothing, snowboarding, skiing, travel and the outdoors — and, if we're completely honest, a desire to make a few extra quid for the next snowboard trip.
That was pretty much it.
And somehow, nearly two decades later, we're still here.
This is the story of Longsands Clothing Co.
The good bits, the bad ideas, the shops, the markets, the clothes, the bars, the mistakes — some of which we're still paying for — and, most importantly, the people who've kept coming back.
It started with a snowboard trip
The earliest version of Longsands appeared around 2008.
At the time, we were heavily influenced by the clothing surrounding the sports and lifestyle we loved.
Snowboarding and skiing were the big ones for us. Trips to the mountains, snowboard culture and the brands associated with it had a massive influence on what we wore and what we thought was cool.
Then there was the wider surf, skate, snow and outdoor world around brands like O'Neill, Billabong, Volcom, Burton, Roxy and Quiksilver.
They weren't just selling T-shirts.
They had an identity.
You knew what those brands stood for. Their clothes were connected to places, music, sports, travel and a particular way of spending your time.
We loved that.
But all of those influences came from somewhere else.
We were from the North East of England.
Our beaches weren't lined with palm trees. Our winters were properly cold. Our idea of getting outdoors usually required considerably more clothing than the advertising coming out of California suggested.
And gradually an idea formed:
What would our version of that look like?
Not a copy of California.
Something from here.
Something influenced by the coast, snow, travel, adventure and the North East itself.
That idea eventually became Longsands.
And the initial motivation was considerably less romantic than all of that makes it sound.
We wanted to make some extra money for another snowboard trip.
Market stalls, Facebook and figuring it out as we went
There was no enormous launch.
We started small.
Really small.
Local market stalls became one of the first places people encountered Longsands.
We'd make things, put them in front of people and see what happened.
And that was probably the best market research we could have had.
You quickly learn the difference between something your mates tell you is mint and something a stranger is actually willing to hand over money for.
We could see what people picked up.
What they put back.
Which colours disappeared first.
Which designs got ignored.
What people asked for.
And slowly, Longsands started finding an audience.
Social media was becoming increasingly important too, and that eventually became a massive part of the Longsands story.
But before we get to that, there's another business we need to talk about.
Longsands wasn't actually our first business
Andy and John met while at university.
They were studying completely different subjects but happened to work together in a bar.
That friendship eventually led to Custom Planet, a clothing printing and embroidery company.
Initially it was basically a two-man operation.
That turned out to be incredibly important to what happened next.
We understood garments.
We understood printing.
We understood embroidery.
And most importantly, we had access to the equipment required to turn a stupid idea scribbled down somewhere into an actual piece of clothing.
So eventually came the dangerous question:
Why don't we make our own brand?
Longsands was the answer.
The businesses would grow independently, but having manufacturing knowledge behind Longsands meant we could experiment in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.
And experiment we did.
Some successfully.
Some considerably less so.
2013: Longsands becomes real
By 2013, the experiment had become something more serious.
Longsands Clothing Co officially launched.
The influences were still those brands and lifestyles we'd grown up loving — snowboarding, skiing, surf and skate culture, travel, music and being outdoors — but we wanted Longsands to have its own North East identity.
And around this point another person became increasingly important to what Longsands would become.
Holly Dark.
Holly's influence went much further than simply adding women's clothing to the range.
With a background and natural interest in fashion and retail, she became heavily involved in clothing design, garment selection, fabrics, fits and colours.
That mattered.
Andy and John could choose something they thought looked great. Holly could explain why nobody else was going to wear it.
Sometimes they even listened.
More importantly, Holly became Longsands' Social Media Manager.
That was huge for a young independent brand.
Social media gave us a way to build an audience without the advertising budgets available to established clothing companies.
Longsands developed a voice.
We could show new products.
Run competitions.
Talk directly to customers.
Show what was happening behind the scenes.
And gradually build a community around the brand rather than simply trying to sell people T-shirts.
The three roles complemented each other.
The manufacturing knowledge.
The ideas and commercial side.
The fashion, fit and social side.
Longsands was starting to become a proper brand.
2014: we got a shop
Then came one of those moments that makes a small business suddenly feel very real.
We opened a shop in Tynemouth.
Longsands had a front door.
The Green Ginger Shopping Arcade on Front Street became home and, suddenly, something that had existed through markets, Facebook posts and piles of clothing had a physical space.
It was exciting.
And it taught us an enormous amount.
Customers weren't order numbers anymore.
People came in.
They tried things on.
They talked to us.
They told us what they liked.
They definitely told us what they didn't like.
We started seeing the same faces returning.
Christmas presents became repeat customers.
People who bought one hat came back the next winter for another.
Longsands started becoming part of people's wardrobes.
And with that success came confidence.
Possibly a little too much confidence.
Eldon Garden: our first Newcastle lesson
Tynemouth had worked.
So naturally we thought:
Newcastle.
Opening a city-centre shop felt like the obvious next step.
More footfall.
More customers.
More sales.
Bigger opportunity.
So we opened in Eldon Garden.
And we got it wrong.
The shop lasted around two years before we eventually closed it.
There wasn't one catastrophic event.
It was the combination of all the boring things that can quietly kill a retail business.
The rent was too high.
The rates were too high.
The location wasn't good enough.
And we'd overestimated the demand.
Sales simply weren't strong enough to support the cost of being there.
That's an uncomfortable thing to admit when you've spent money opening a shop, fitting it out, filling it with stock and telling everyone how exciting your new location is.
Closing it feels like failure.
Because at the time, it is.
You have to remove the stock.
Strip out what you've built.
Walk away from the money you've spent.
And deal with whatever financial commitments remain afterwards.
The frustrating thing about business mistakes is that they don't necessarily disappear when you close the door.
Some of the decisions we made opening, renovating and closing failed stores are things we're still financially paying for years later.
But Eldon Garden taught us something extremely important:
A busy city doesn't automatically mean a profitable shop.
We should probably have remembered that lesson more carefully.
STACK: Newcastle, attempt number two
We weren't ready to give up on Newcastle.
So when the opportunity came to open at STACK Newcastle in 2018, it felt different.
STACK was new.
Busy.
Interesting.
It had food, drink, events and independent businesses together in one place.
It felt much more like Longsands.
So we tried again.
And there were plenty of good things about it.
People discovered the brand.
The atmosphere suited us.
We had another Newcastle presence.
But ultimately we encountered the same fundamental problem.
The sales didn't justify the costs.
It didn't matter whether a shop looked successful from the outside.
The maths still had to work.
Eventually STACK became our second failed attempt at making a permanent Newcastle retail store financially sustainable.
That's not the sexiest sentence you'll ever read in a brand story.
But it's an important one.
Because without Eldon Garden and STACK, Longsands Après probably wouldn't exist.
The problem wasn't necessarily the clothes
Looking back, we started recognising a pattern.
Longsands could have brilliant periods.
Particularly through autumn and winter.
When the temperature dropped, Longsands made sense.
Hoodies.
Sweatshirts.
Beanies.
Bobble hats.
Christmas presents.
Winter was where we made our money.
Then the warmer months arrived.
Clothing sales didn't disappear, but they ticked over.
Unfortunately, rent doesn't tick over.
Rates don't tick over.
Staff costs don't tick over.
A physical shop costs money every month whether you're selling hundreds of hoodies or waiting for someone to wander in and buy a T-shirt.
That was the fundamental flaw.
We were trying to make a year-round physical retail model work around a business with highly seasonal sales.
Twice we'd learned the expensive way that it didn't.
So we asked a different question.
Instead of:
How do we sell enough clothing all year to pay for a shop?
What if the shop could make money doing something else too?
Longsands Après
That question eventually became Longsands Après.
And this time, there was a proper business reason behind what might have looked from the outside like us randomly deciding to open a bar.
The idea was actually very simple.
During autumn and winter, clothing could be the powerhouse.
During spring and summer, when clothing sales slowed down, coffee, food, beer and drinks could help make the physical space pay for itself.
The café-bar wasn't separate from the shop.
It was the thing that could allow the shop to exist all year.
And culturally it made complete sense.
Our biggest influence had always been snowboarding and skiing.
We loved mountain bars.
We loved après-ski.
We loved the feeling at the end of a day on the mountain when everyone piles into a bar still wearing half their gear.
Music on.
Drinks flowing.
People talking absolute rubbish about how good they were on the slopes that day.
So we brought our version of that home.
In 2020, in North Shields, Longsands Après was born.
Clothing.
Coffee.
Beer.
Cocktails.
A physical home for Longsands that had more than one reason for people to walk through the door.
After two failed attempts at traditional retail, we'd finally found a model that made more sense.
One part of the business could support the other.
Then the world shut down
Of course, we'd chosen 2020 to do this.
Excellent timing.
Opening a hospitality business just as the world entered a global pandemic wasn't ideal.
But Longsands had spent its entire existence adapting.
So we adapted again.
Click and collect became important.
Online sales mattered more than ever.
People could order their Longsands clothing and collect it.
When restrictions allowed, the hospitality side came back.
And eventually Après started proving the idea behind it.
A Longsands physical location didn't have to survive purely by selling clothing.
It could be somewhere people actually wanted to spend time.
That changed the direction of the business.
Morpeth — and another lesson
The success of Après gave us confidence.
Possibly — once again — a little too much.
In 2021, Longsands Après Morpeth opened on Bridge Street.
It was bigger.
More ambitious.
A larger hospitality offering.
And eventually, Morpeth closed too.
That's part of our history.
We don't want to rewrite it.
Not every expansion works.
Not every location works.
Not every good concept works everywhere.
And sometimes growth can create just as many problems as it solves.
We've learned that lesson more than once.
Clothes, manufacturing and another expensive education
Retail wasn't the only area where we made mistakes.
As Longsands grew, producing more garments overseas seemed like the obvious next step.
Fully custom clothing.
Lower unit prices.
Bigger production runs.
On a spreadsheet it looked fantastic.
Reality was slightly different.
Large minimum quantities meant tying enormous amounts of money up in stock.
If something sold, brilliant.
If it didn't, you could be staring at boxes of it for years.
Eventually it goes into a sale.
Then another sale.
Then you're practically begging somebody to take it.
Long lead times also meant that when something unexpectedly became a bestseller, getting more wasn't necessarily quick.
And if we wanted to tweak a fit, change a colour or alter a print, we couldn't simply walk into production and do it.
So again, we changed.
More of what we do moved closer to home.
Smaller runs.
More flexibility.
More control.
More ability to react to what customers actually want.
It might not always produce the absolute cheapest garment.
But we've learned that the cheapest option can become incredibly expensive when you've got 500 of them sitting in boxes.
Holly, Longsands and finding our style
As the brand evolved, Holly's influence became increasingly important.
Particularly because Longsands gradually moved away from thinking about clothes in strict men's and women's categories.
We started paying much more attention to fit.
How something actually hangs.
The weight of a fabric.
How oversized is too oversized.
Whether a hoodie feels substantial enough.
Whether a T-shirt needs to be boxier.
Which colours actually work together.
And something became increasingly obvious:
The lasses were nicking the lads' clothes anyway.
That relaxed, oversized, boyfriend-fit approach has gradually become part of Longsands' DNA.
Today, unisex pieces and comfortable silhouettes are a huge part of the range.
Holly's role across fashion, fit, fabric and social media helped bridge the gap between making clothing and understanding how our customers actually wanted to wear it.
That's still shaping what we make now.
The customer has always been the constant
Through all of these changes, the most consistent part of Longsands hasn't actually been us.
It's been you lot.
Some customers have been with us for years.
Some of you have enough Longsands beanies to open a small shop of your own.
There are people who buy one every Christmas.
People who still own designs we'd almost forgotten existed.
People who ask us to bring something back from ten years ago.
People who bought from market stalls.
People who remember Green Ginger.
People who remember Eldon Garden.
People who found us at STACK.
People who came for a hoodie at Après and stayed for a pint.
And people discovering Longsands for the first time today.
That loyalty has allowed Longsands to be imperfect.
And we think that's quite important.
We're an independent business.
We don't have unlimited budgets to research every decision until failure is impossible.
Sometimes we genuinely just think:
That's mint. Let's make it.
Occasionally you're completely with us.
Occasionally you very clearly aren't.
We've learned to live with that.
2024: Chalet '86
Après had taught us something else.
People didn't necessarily see Longsands as just somewhere to buy clothes anymore.
They enjoyed the places too.
So in 2024 we opened Chalet '86 in North Shields.
A premium sports bar with the Longsands mountain and après influence running through it.
Big screens.
Sport.
Darts.
Games.
Drinks.
A little bit of the Alps transported to North Shields.
It was another evolution of an idea that had originally started because we couldn't make a normal clothing shop profitable all year.
Funny how things work out.
The Longsands Collective
Eventually we'd created a slightly unusual problem.
Longsands meant lots of different things.
There was Longsands Clothing Co.
Longsands Après.
Chalet '86.
And eventually The Lodge.
They were connected, but they weren't the same business.
The answer became the Longsands Collective.
A family of businesses connected by the same influences and personality.
Clothing.
Travel.
Mountains.
Coast.
Sport.
Hospitality.
Music.
The North East.
And ironically, putting those businesses together under the Collective has allowed us to separate them more clearly.
Because Longsands Clothing Co doesn't need to be everything.
It can concentrate on what it was created to do.
Make really good clothes.
2026: The Lodge
Then in 2026 we opened The Lodge at Chalet '86.
Another extension of that original Longsands idea around travel, adventure and the places and experiences we love.
Think back to where this started.
Two students.
A printing business.
A few clothes.
Market stalls.
And trying to make enough extra money for a snowboard trip.
It's gone slightly further than expected.
And we're still paying for some of it
Business stories are normally much tidier when they're told backwards.
Someone has an idea.
They work hard.
The business grows.
Everyone lives happily ever after.
Ours hasn't worked like that.
Some of our successes have come directly from our failures.
Après exists partly because Eldon Garden and STACK taught us that traditional retail wasn't financially sustainable for us.
Our current manufacturing approach exists partly because tying up too much money in overseas stock taught us the value of flexibility.
The Collective exists because Longsands grew into several different businesses and needed a structure that made sense.
And we're still dealing with the financial consequences of some decisions made years ago.
That's the bit people don't always see.
You can close a failed shop in a weekend.
It can take years to finish paying for it.
We've made mistakes that cost thousands.
We've misjudged demand.
We've opened in the wrong places.
We've renovated premises that didn't work.
We've bought too much stock.
We've held onto ideas longer than we should have.
And undoubtedly we'll get things wrong again.
But we're still here.
What Longsands is now
Nearly two decades after that first idea, we're probably clearer about Longsands Clothing Co than we've ever been.
It's not about pretending we're somewhere we're not.
It's a North East clothing brand shaped by the things we've always loved:
Snowboarding. Skiing. Surf and skate culture. Streetwear. Travel. The outdoors. The coast. Music. Sport.
It's comfortable.
It's increasingly unisex.
It's oversized when oversized feels better.
It's practical when the North East weather requires it.
Sometimes it's understated.
Sometimes it's a simple embroidered sweatshirt.
And occasionally it's a vintage washed hoodie with an enormous technicolour shark on the back.
We still make things because we want to wear them.
We still change our minds.
We still experiment.
And we're still small enough that when customers tell us something isn't right, it can genuinely change what we make next.
Nearly two decades of figuring it out
Success means something different to us now.
Of course we want Longsands to grow.
We want successful collections.
We want busy venues.
We want more people to discover the brand.
But there's something quite satisfying about simply having survived long enough to have a proper history.
We've watched trends arrive, disappear and inexplicably come back again.
We've opened shops.
We've closed shops.
We've opened bars.
We've produced overseas.
We've brought more production home.
We've had bestsellers.
We've had absolute disasters.
We've changed logos.
We've changed websites.
We've made good decisions.
We've made some spectacularly expensive ones.
And through all of it, there's still a Longsands.
More importantly, there are still people who want to wear it.
Created with love. Made in the North.
That old Longsands line probably means more to us now than when we first wrote it.
Because Longsands isn't really the story of creating the perfect business.
Far from it.
It's about building something, getting things wrong, learning, changing direction and sticking around long enough to figure out what you're actually good at.
It's about Andy, John and Holly.
Custom Planet.
Market stalls.
Snowboard trips.
Green Ginger.
Eldon Garden.
STACK.
North Shields.
Morpeth.
Après.
Chalet '86.
The Lodge.
Boxes of things we definitely ordered too many of.
And thousands of customers who've bought something, worn it, washed it, battered it and hopefully come back for another one.
Longsands has become much bigger than the little clothing idea we started with.
But clothing is still where it all began.
And as we head into the next chapter, Longsands Clothing is coming right back to the centre.
Nearly twenty years later, the idea isn't actually that different.
Make things we love.
Make them comfortable.
Make them properly.
Don't pretend to be something we're not.
And see where it takes us next.
Longsands Clothing Co.
Created with love. Made in the North.
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