A rising force in the technical apparel space, Early Majority are a fine hub of rebellion against the established corporate design approach and inane commerciality, a small gem off the beaten path of the self-destructive industry highway.

The brand has a unique business model, which focuses predominantly on the ethos and community of explorers, eager to learn how things can be done and experienced differently.

With their values, activism and ideology reflected on their social media, Early Majority are forming a connection with the real people, non-athletes, outdoor enthusiasts, in search of mindfulness as opposed to performance.

Early Majority encourages a simple approach, where one doesn't need tons of professional gear and performance-boosted flashy apparel in order to connect with nature, and so pioneers the slow return of the industry back to its roots: quiet necessity, gender equality, uncompromising quality.

Joy: We wanted to do things very differently from the established corporate way and that is honestly the only reason to start your own company – you have to have a vision on how you can do things differently.

My work experience until now really affected how we decided to run EM. I would say two big insights for me were understanding the prevailing business model of apparel. I really learned about that while I was at Nike, working on the Converse brand. That brand is more than a century old, and we wanted to innovate. It was very clear what people who love Chucks wanted – the shoes not hurting their feet. It is so clear, and yet the reason that this has not been done, the reason that the shoes hurt, the reason that they have not been improved overtime had everything to do with the prevailing business model at the company.

Essentially they used to be a performance sneaker for basketball. As soon as they became more of a fashion staple the company just value engineered that product, taking quality out of it.

We launched the product called Chuck 70, which was a real battle, one of many that I had in the corporate world. We had a real motivation to engineer quality back into the product.

I am really proud that now you can see people with taste and style wearing them everywhere in the world, but It really stuck with me that it is very hard to do something that is objectively speaking better than what people are already selling. How crazy is that?

So that is why my time working in tech gave me a perspective on the industry of apparel and kind of emboldened me to realise that we can do this differently and we can do this better.

The difference between tech and apparel is that there is no commonplace progression for products. There is exciting innovation in the material department with less environmental impact, and we are very keen on that, but I think around the growth of your business or better methods for selling and improving individual products over time – there is not a lot of it. It is all about selling new and more, more and new again.

L.Holl: My start of interest in clothes was what the cool people like and what they were wearing, and overtime it decreased from the actual clothes and increased my interest for what they stand for. When I first heard about the Early Majority they had no clothes, no product, nothing. It was the exact time I was switching my values and me getting into brands and their standing, and Early Majority's standing was the exact one I shared deeply.

Joy: We are all learning as we go. Going back to my time in tech, we decided that we would build the whole company in public, and so we started with newsletters and manifestos on LinkedIn. We explored themes for this brand that was not out there yet, what could it stand for and who would be interested in these ideals, who sees the opportunities in this space. We invited people to join us, become the early majority with us. It was very vulnerable.

For us to show things so early on was hard and I am very grateful to people who have been there from the beginning and sticking through it all. When Louis did his first shoot for us we knew that this was the feeling we wanted others to get from the brand. That sentiment and ethos we were going for.

The one radical idea at the heart of what we do is trying to grow the business by expanding our community, rather than making more products. We don't know how to do that, we are learning from others and taking the approach of test, learn, iterate.

We knew that building a brand is very two way. What the brand stands for is absolutely the net result of the people that wear it. You can understand some qualities and the mindset of the person you've met by the clothes and brands he/she is wearing. But when you don't have the brand yet it is kind of impossible to have that two way interaction. It is only now we are getting to a point, with so many subscribers and members of our community, where we can have that dialogue. We can talk and listen to and not just monologue into the void.

Joy: We actually debated about this a lot. A brand designing only for women is not necessarily a feminist way forward. A lot of us want a product that is as cool as the ones made for the guys, that performs as well. Men want to support women, we learned that from our interactions with our members: they know and they want to stand behind a women lead design, it is cool for everyone.

We wanted a brand that stood for gender equality together for both men and women and it not being a big deal. I hope we get to a point where we can just be: who is not against misogyny? What kind of a douche is sexist anymore? I think we worked out a line that is gender neutral and is well made, while looking great on everyone.

Hanna: My background is actually menswear design and I spent a lot of time designing for men's bodies. I was never satisfied with womenswear, due to the lack of some of those design decisions and elements commonly found on any clothes made for men. It felt very natural for me to design something that can be worn by both genders. There are obviously some things that are different about the bodies, and from a physiological point of view some of the elements of clothes will have to be a bit different, but in general I've found that it was very easy to make it work for everyone. I really didn't want to be limited by such a strong thing as gender expression, which for me is frankly boring nowadays. It is so much more exciting to see so many people finding their own balance. We can help with that by making the garments modular and adjustable, zipping in or out some of the parts of our clothes and making them fit you for your oversize day or your sporty adventure day.

Hanna: We design a product and have a lot of internal feedback, but at some point it has to be shipped. You can do a lot of tinkering forever, but it needs to be released. We use the process of improving on the design overtime, releasing versions of the silhouette like software updates. It helps that our community actively talks to us and provides a lot of user feedback on everything. I have a treasure trove on my drive of just feedback articles on our garments. Whilst we make the final decisions on the product, this dialogue helps shape your thinking that you would not normally be able to have.

Joy: One of the biggest opportunities is to have an ability to improve direct communication between me and Hanna. I've worked as a CMO, but here I take ultimate responsibility for the product and I've been learning a lot on how to not compromise a creative and design vision and for Hanna to realise what she wants herself. It has been an important learning curve for both. I know now that sometimes I have to stay out of it. Creativity is so algorithmically driven nowadays, and it has been very humbling for those of us who have worked in the creative space for a long time, because you can think of something to be a best choice only for people's behavior on social media to be totally different in the ways you couldn't even predict, because you have so much subjectivity involved.

Joy: Mine changes, depending on the season, but the one I've dreamed about was the shell. If we can narrow down the whole EM dream it would be that I really wanted a raincoat that is actually waterproof, that I can ride my bike in and keep my face from getting wet. It is still the area we are very passionate about, because the hood construction on most raincoats is garbage. The shell was my north star, but nowadays also there is our puffer, that works from a ski slope to a hike to a restaurant to laying on grass as a blanket.

L.holl: From my recent shoot I adore the fleece with the neck zips and since I have had the windshell, I have worn it almost everyday, it has quickly become one of my favorite pieces I own.

Hanna: I would pick the anorak, which is my baby from the start. I practically live in it. I had a similar style piece back in the day, but it really bugged me that this cool idea lacks so many logical features, so we made it properly to suit our wants. And also that light fleece, obviously.

Joy: There is such an organic process to building a brand, that it is almost cringy to try and distill it down to a description: do you really need to say it? Can't you just experience it?

So I offer you a meme instead of a pitch, and it's the «Girlmoss» meme. Real people care less about summiting the biggest mountain or surfing the biggest wave, and of course we will always admire people who do that, but what each of us really wants is to have that experience of expansiveness in nature, the feeling of connection and being one with nature. That to me what that meme gets to, that is very much what we are trying to do.

The reason that this feeling of oneness with nature matters so much is that we have been separated from it, from each other. This is why our brand is a brand for us – for being together.

There are no externalities. Microplastics is probably the best example of that: you can be a billionaire and have your bunker in Australia or plan your trip to Mars after the Earth is in flames, but we all are ingesting plastics now, nobody is exempt from that, everyone is connected. That realisation I think is very profound and something we need to embrace in what we do.

L.Holl: First of all, the IG pages in general are literally just highlights. It is easy for people to perceive it all as a dream life and be jealous of and want this life, which is just an image. It is a little bit different in reality. I am not required to post equal balance of everything in my life, but I just wish people would remember this fact about anyone they follow, this can even be friends.

Nature has always been a part of the clothes that I post and it has always been clothes in nature. I want people to get into nature more, to be more connected and reintegrate to where we were. The easiest way for me to achieve that with my skills and interests was and is to do it via fashion, via clothes: look at how cool these garments are, you should try using them in nature, because that is what it's for.

It has to be made to be perceived as cool, because people rarely want to do anything unless it is cool, thus if you make nature cool everyone will want to do it. As everyone started getting into this gorp movement, making more accounts, posting more outdoor brands and making it a direction, for me the overall experience became too saturated: obviously everyone got the message.

I want to go more into wellness and mindfulness, concepts that help you make some lifestyle changes and make them be perceived as cool. That is the angle I am coming from nowadays. I guess as my knowledge and awareness develops so do my intentions.

When you come at the idea of nature from a consumer perspective, where the message is more like "Buy clothes and go outside" – the first step there is to buy something: clothes, a mug, a tent, whatever it is, this should be the other way around. We have a responsibility with our influence and voices to support the brands like Early Majority, that align with you and your values, and this way we can decrease the destructive consumerism and its impact.

I mean I understand even if the brand does well on all of these points, people still want to buy multiple things for the status or validation, there is probably no way around that, and obviously brands have to make money, however I think consumers are getting smarter and conscious, so hopefully we can carry on long enough to see the result of these changes.

Joy: You have to realise that it is just very recently that people brought any creativity and sense of style to outdoor activities. I would say for sure in the very beginning of Patagonia they had a killer sense of style, it was all very natural. Later however the outdoor space became so macho, focusing on performance and tricks, wacky colors and all.

When we talk about our adventure and our activism, part of it is art, because the experience of being in nature should be beautiful and why can't you have a sense of style when you are doing it? If we do it this way, won't we attract more people to these activities, and won't we actually enable them to have less products? That is progression. I think everyone who is doing it should give themselves more credit.

Joy: For people who work as artists, they are so often so multidisciplinary that just the idea of separating music from visual art or anything they do is very superficial for them. I do think the refusal to accept things being divided is powerful. From our research we have found that people are sick of the infinite divisibility of marketed needs. This divisibility of the things you actually need so that you can buy something to cure it – people are resisting it more and more.

Music and psychedelics have always been connected and influential in the space, especially in the 60s and 70s. I think they are coming back now for a host of reasons. We have talked about it in our first collaboration with Louis: whenever you have economical hardships, people are more inclined to seek simpler pleasures, which psychedelics are, and also people now are looking to reconnect with nature more, which psychedelics have been a part of and a part of many people's mental practices, experiencing nature in that way. I think to not acknowledge that, when you are working on an outdoor brand is super limited.

The other feeling, where musical connection comes from, is the feeling of being marginalised. There is a degree of safety and ease that you are allowed to have outside based on your gender, color of your skin and so on. We design to account for that. For example the hoods on the shell are made that way specifically so that you can actually feel safer, if you don't want people to see you. When we started the company during the beginning of COVID19 pandemic and with all the tragedies and injustice happening across the world we could not just have thrown our activism out the door – we decided to design it into the fabric of our clothing.

L.Holl: Everyone who is buying a product is a human. People are complex, they are not just into running, or outdoors, or music or anything singular. Why would a brand not cater to a wider range of interests of people? If a brand hits 3 or 4 points of interest for me, I will be 3 or 4 times more involved in that brand and identify with it. Why is this something new or foreign for the wider industry?

Joy: We love things that acknowledge us a whole people, there is just more money to be made pretending otherwise.

Joy: Latest that we created was this made-to-order snow capsule, where you can do snow sports in the same kit you bike in, so our main goal is still to push this multi-functionality, since I strongly believe that the divisibility of needs is dated and not great for the planet. Our thoughtfulness and technical details that have gone into the product like the one described is what you can expect from us in the future. Otherwise we want to improve our products, not make more of them. The silhouettes we chose are timeless, like our anorak or the trucker jacket, that is why they have the naming they have. Windbreaker 2.0 is better than the 1.0 – we wanna work like that.

We also want to curate a broader selection of products in partnership with the communities we are working with, more on that to come for sure. And the really important thing is our circularity push, where people could buy things that have already been owned. By the time this comes out we will have had our collaboration with Stephen O'Malley from the band "Sunn O)))". We are dressing all of the musicians for this outdoor performance at Carnac, which is this French equivalent of the Stonehenge. The clothes we will use to dress up the performers we will also use to set up our resale platform. For me this is very exciting!

Joy: The way we usually talk about it is this idea of an evolution of direct to consumer model: that was really a misnomer. The future of business as we see it is making directly for your community. We see ourselves as pioneering the idea of a direct to community model and that is what this business is meant to be, and that is the way we will keep growing, and we will keep doing it very faithfully to the core people who have gathered around us.

I think what really inspires me in terms of other businesses starting up is the transparency about the process, and I am really inspired by businesses that start really small. I don't think you can start too small, because that is the best way to reduce any waste. For us doing things that are made-to-order, drop shipped and all, we are just being very practical with our e-commerce infrastructure we have built, but we are always looking for the ways that we can use and improve that on a small and large scale for the business to grow.

Joy: We decided on the name "Early Majority" because when 34 percent of people will be wearing our clothes we will stop working forever. *laughs*

Jokes aside, Early Majority was kind of a stealth name in the beginning. The brand had a different name – "Forcefield". We had this idea of your clothes creating a forcefield around you and our brand being a bigger forcefield for the world, but we started calling it Early Majority while working on the naming, it stuck and everyone got very into it.

It was kind of a joke for me personally, because I would talk to so many tech companies who thought that the only problem they had was that they could not penetrate the early majority of consumers and if I could help them do that. I was so sick of those calls so I said to myself that I would create my own early majority.

People who don't know about the origins of the term, and it comes down to our relationship with tech and our age, respond very positively to the idea of thinking that we are not isolated or marginalized – we are early. We are the part of the group that eventually will be the dominant group. People like to see themselves as working towards a goal that is shared that someday will be the majority.

Early Majority is taking a spin on the most adequate industry approach to date: minimalism in consumerism. By providing an outdoor experience with less required equipment, through simplification and utility, they are democratizing the outdoors.

While the brand is leading the change, the customers are evolving simultaneously, as they realize they are being fed consumerism and in turn try to resist it. They are consciously starting to buy luxury essentials, researching to find the best option for their needs.

With increasing uncertainty, greenwashing and inflation, however, consumers' trust in brands is heavily undermined. Worthy of shoppers' attention, Early Majority offers a membership, which, aside from environmental benefits, offers significant perks to its members such as early and exclusive access to products, free shipping and returns, among others.

Rather fascinating is also the brand's approach to product design, which is continuously thought of as work in progress. This allows customers to participate in the creation with their direct feedback and for the product to constantly evolve. It becomes community-engineered.

Because the product range consists of only a handful of pieces, it is easier for them to be continuously updated and innovated. When the garments are offered to the Early Majority community, its members can pick and upgrade their features themselves, tailoring them to their specific needs.

For instance, features customizable by shoppers include: detachable hood, front panel detachment for fit adjustment, helmet-compatible hood addition, and sacoche pack for jacket storage. Most of those features are available on the puffer and the shell, which makes the two the most modular pieces in the offering by far. Another interesting design element is their pouch, which makes the wearer's phone untraceable and off the grid, in turn allowing the users to immerse themselves in nature completely, unbothered by social pressures.

The most significant and characteristic of the brand's features, however, are the three-way funnel hood, as well as the detachable badges. The latter provide the wearer with the opportunity to manifest their support for an artist, campaign, charity or brand and prompt self-expression, meanwhile ensuring better recycling and decomposition.

It is, further, a priority for Early Majority to keep a good balance between ethical sourcing and performance. Therefore, most of their materials are recycled, with a responsible cycle of production. Some of the main materials used are Pertex Shield and Pertex Quantum for their jackets and shells, Re:Down for their filling, as well as Pontetorto for their fleeces.

The main pillars of the brand's environmental efforts, though, are longevity and utility. Those, along with the membership program, ensure an adequate lifespan of the garments and so contribute to decreased amounts of consumption and industry waste, and prevent overproduction.

Repairability is, too, a huge step for Early Majority, whose manufacturing and mending happens at the same factory. This guarantees consistent quality of production and repair, but also marks a significant advancement towards circularity.

When it comes to their return-repair-resell process, in the near future one will be able to purchase pre-owned gear on the brand's resale website and all garment tracking can be done via a QR code, available on the piece. This simplified and transparent communication eases the e-commerce process and forms a direct connection to the shopper.

Other steps Early Majority has taken on the field of sustainability are to be seen in their packaging as well. Those include the use of compostable garment bags, recycled cardboard, paper tape, and biodegradable tags, which, when planted, grow as flowers.

Riding the wave of sustainability and simultaneously forging revolutionary paths and business models, Early Majority is a pioneer in a utopian outdoor industry, where the connection and respect between humans and nature are the foundation for innovation, and good design is not compromised by sustainability efforts.