Taylor Morris: Behind The Brand

In just over two years, Taylor Morris has gone from a business plan handwritten in a local Pret to the coolest name on the sunglasses scene. The brand has gone from strength to strength, enjoying a meteoric rise to the nose of London’s most stylish. Having done the unthinkable and gone from an early career in reality TV to establishing a very credible label in British style; The Gentleman’s Journal sat down with the company’s founders, Hugo Taylor and Charlie Morris, to have a chat about their journey from struggling to fill a department store shelf to a much anticipated global launch, what makes them tick creatively and just how beautiful Namibia really is:

Hugo: It kind of happened really naturally as Charlie and I both shared this immense passion from a ridiculously young age. I look at pictures of me when I was 11/12 years old in Italy when I was there with my parents and I was always insisting on going to buy sunglasses, then I was always interested in art and design, but we started working together in London relaunching China White, the nightclub in Soho.

We thought we were going to have this amazing job whereby we’d come in and just literally live the life of Riley. Doing this turned out to be the exact opposite, it was about probably working 15 hours a day, 5 days a week. It basically necessitated us to come in each day wearing sunglasses. We’d finish work at 5 am and have to be back at our desks at midday, so we’d have to hide our hideous faces, but every time we’d look back up and we’d both be wearing something new and I think from that, whenever were frustrated from work, we’d go and talk about sunglasses.

Charlie: Sort of what we could do, why we’d want to do it and how it could evolve and then a few drunken nights in Ibiza and we came up with the name, and then I think from then on we were also asking people, ‘what does everyone think of Taylor Morris?’

Hugo: I’ve got the photo of where we came up with Taylor Morris. It’s a beach in Ibiza, I’m wearing a Ralph Lauren pair of shades and he’s wearing a RayBan, but that is the actual moment.

Charlie: We always wanted that heritage feel, that the name of the brand has been around for a while – it’s got that heritage-British, coolness.

Hugo: We both thought we were quite cool wearing necklaces, we look like f***ing idiots man. But no, that really was it. I think it’s so funny. We thought: we’ve got the branding; the visuals of what we want to do; but when it came to the actual process of trying to get a product we were so clueless.

Charlie: We had no idea, we wanted to do stuff with stones, these great ideas of tortoiseshells and amazing colours and acetates, but how to actually get them and make it into a product, we had no idea whatsoever. When we were back in London, we sat down in a Pret, our first business meeting – we realised we literally had no idea.

Hugo: Our business partner, who’s the managing director, came onboard, kicked everyone into shape and said let me do the business and you focus on the design. That’s our very first meeting, 5 December 2012, and that is the basic business plan that basically the whole business sprung from. Now you fast forward three years and we’re in Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Sunglass Hut.

Charlie: Nick has just gone out to meet with Bloomingdales, Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong. Dubai, we just launched last week – Hugo and I were out there to do our global launch, doing an exclusive with Harvey Nichols in Dubai. We met some good bloggers and press out there, just trying to shout about the brand and get the awareness going.

C: No not really, but I’ve always had a huge passion for art. Hugo studied at the Courtauld Institute doing history of art, so we have that kind of creativity, but I didn’t go into design actually. I always had a huge passion for eyewear, I love sunglasses, I know the kind of brand that I would want, I know the kind of colours and feel I want, and we’ve really learned so much in the last two years.

H: I think we have a real appreciation for beauty and a certain aesthetic. I think with Charlie and I, even separately from sunglasses, if you put a whole range of things in front of us, we’d always point to the same thing we’d like.

C: We have the same kind of feel for style, we know what we want. If you look at all of our glasses, there’s not much branding on it, it’s more understated and subtle, but we also bring out the modernness, with all of our different colourations of lenses and acetates. It’s just a bit of us. Hugo was saying the other week that I’ll put on a Savile Row suit, which is done by an amazing tailor and is very classic in like a grey herringbone, but then I’ll put on some red socks with it to jazz it up. Which has always been us from since I can remember really.

Saratoga II, £150.00 from Taylor Morris

H: Well it’s the three of us who basically started it and friendship is probably one of the core elements of the brand. If you look at what we do, it’s not like Versace where it’s dripping with sex, our brand’s a lot more plutonic because we’re unisex. But they basically stand for honesty, loyalty and generosity, which we think are the three most important things in friendship and we try and bring that into what we do.

C: We try and bring that into our brand, we try and utilise all of the people around us, who are our friends. Charlie Casely-Hayford [who stars in the latest campaign] best friends with Hugo. The photographer Grey Hutton went to Harrow, best friends with Hugo, friends with me.

H: Obviously talented people though, not just our mates. Grey is also photo editor of Vice, and Charlie’s quickly becoming one of the most established name in British fashion.

H: Well we were in Namibia, where we shot our last campaign and we were really inspired there by the topography, the colour combination of wood to sky and these pearlescent sunsets with this amazing colour of the earth.

C: It’s kind of like the rocks at the Erongo Mountain where we were, and you see the sky bleeding onto it.

H: We were invited down there to come shoot our campaign by the Namibian Tourist Board. Part of the Taylor Morris brand ethos, which has kind of developed, is that we’re a brand about adventure and discovery, but not in a traditional way. I think it was always a very British trait, Gilbert Scott and the Antarctic and Columbus, to go push boundaries. So we shot our last one there and we’re shooting our next one in Mayakoba, Mexico.

Zero, £210.00 from Taylor Morris

C: We will get onto that at some point. We’ve got to walk before we can run really. We’re just kind of developing and getting there with our sunglasses – now we’ve got 48. When we started we had 11, which was two years ago, and we couldn’t even fill half a shelf in Harvey Nichols. Now we have a whole bay with our collection, which is a pretty good achievement I feel.

We were just upstairs and we found a pair from when we first launched and we were like: ‘Did we actually make this?’ It was flimsy. Our whole ethos is to keep continually improving the quality, the hinges, getting custom hinges, trying to get custom lenses. Out of this range now, we have four different custom acetates, four that no one else in the world can use. The process to get this acetate is unreal, our timelines are unreal, it can take a year to get these made.

Rollright Rochester, £170.00 from Taylor Morris

H: Trial by error.

C: Literally, our business partner Nicholas got involved and he was like there are two big trade shows every year. One in Milan, it’s called MIDO, and one in Paris, Silmo, and it was a month before December and so he knew in March we had to go to Milan. So he just went on his own, looked at the map, picked three or four different companies that were established, British and not British, and he just went to them. He promoted the label, talked about prototypes, drawings etc.

H: We’re definitely not getting as ripped off as we used to. I think that’s always the surprising thing. There’s one of the highest pillars in British eyewear, they’ll remain nameless, who are probably the most expensive British-made sunglasses. But we walked into their office, showed them some designs, asked if they wanted to get involved and they were like: “Absolutely no way, you guys don’t have a hope in hell”. We now outsell them – that was a proud moment. This is the word, fortitude, which is courage in the face of adversity. I really think when we first started, that’s what it all was. We had no clue, but so much passion and so much enthusiasm. We always knew where we wanted to get to, it hasn’t been easy but I’ll tell you what, it has been bloody fun.

H: We open our eyes I think. Both of us are inspired by different things. Charlie is an immense fan of wrought iron metalwork on handmade British shotguns; I’m a major fan of the British baroque architecture. We’re both responsive to market trends; it’s an amalgamation of all these different influences but with this same design principle, which is classically inspired frames, with an eccentric twist, and I think that’s where we spring off for most things.

C: I agree.

H: We had a great meeting this morning for like three hours where you can feel it, because suddenly you start to see the designs coming out and you’re like: ‘sh*t, this is great, we’re hitting it’. This is our fifth collection, number six I think is going to be our best, but number seven will see us mature to another level.

C: We’re doing a collaboration with Morgan Motors, which is really exciting. We came up with some ideas and we actually just saw some first CAD drawings this morning, which I was kind of blown away by.

H: We went to the factory and they’ve got this very much kind of British-heritage ethos of handmade craftsmanship, passing it on from generation to generation. Charlie and I went down there and really geeked out with their head of design but we took all of these different pictures. Charlie really liked the engraving on the gear knob, or the front of the grill, or the tailpipe.

C: It’s a tailpipe with the holes in it so kind of where the exhaust pipe is along the car and now we’ve incorporated that and we’re going to put it on the arm of our glasses with holes in it. Those little bits of what a collaboration is.

H: You can’t help but be inspired in a situation like that. I think when we first started, we’d go to a trade show and look at what other people were doing, because we didn’t have much of a language ourselves in design. We were kind of fresh into it, but now that we’ve settled into it, I probably avoid looking at other sunglass brands as much as I can to make sure that our visual language stays as Taylor Morris.

Some people ask: ‘How do you develop a style of sunglasses? Aren’t they just sunglasses?’ Well certainly not to Charlie and I – we definitely want people to look at those from afar and be like: ‘Well they’re Taylor Morris’. Because I think you can do that with three other brands at the moment, Ray Ban, for obvious reasons; Persol, for obvious reasons, and Cristian Dior, because right now they’re producing some unique stuff. So I think this particular frame, the new one, the Zero, fact, it’s a round frame but it’s a round frame with Base Zero lenses.

Zero, £210.00 from Taylor Morris

C: The eye looks like a kind of slight hologram.

H: For a unisex shape, on something like this, which has got broad appeal, which we have to – we’re a mass-market, luxury brand. I think, for the price point as well, we’re delivering something really special and that’s really reflected in the orders that have been placed beforehand. So that’s a nice moment.

Visit Taylor Morris for more.

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