Adrien Taylor
Adrien Taylor is founder of Offcut, a company that uses fabric offcuts to make hats and caps. He founded the company after a 2015 visit to his father’s curtain warehouse in Christchurch where he saw a room full of discarded pieces of brand-new fabric. After learning that the company sent them to landfill, he decided to repurpose them into hats.
In March 2018, Adrien travelled alongside four other leading Kiwi fashion entrepreneurs to Thailand, and spent a week getting to know the market and building connections.
The group met with clothing producers, distributors and buyers, showed their garments at a fashion event held at the New Zealand Embassy and attended Bangkok International Fashion Week.
Adrien says, “Seeing how things were made was awesome… it gives you such an appreciation of the amount of work that goes into producing even the smallest of silk garments.
“I think I certainly went to Thailand with the idea that it could be a great place to start manufacturing hats or other things, but just never really thought of it as a place to sell to, but we certainly saw that there's also a potential market there.”