A letter from my heart

 

Haruka is  M O V I N G  

to

 the 

  Red

   Brick

    Building

 

I have had a shop in Glastonbury high street for over thirteen years in three different buildings. It's been a life changing journey of creativity, connection, community, curation, exploration, maturation, grace and expression.

 

 

A place of meeting and stories shared. A tactile, colour-filled temple of texture and hue. A place of raw honesty with an anarchic edge, of nurturing and care, of laughter and tears. A place where I have learned so much about myself and about so many of you. I am proud to be a part of the ever-evolving, multifaceted history of Glastonbury Culture. I am proud to be a village shop

 

 

The Haruka shop, named after my son, is a place of empowerment and transformation. A place of truth. A place both of adornment and the stripping away of layers. It's been something so much more than selling clothes. 

 

Of course, there are the clothes. But I am always going on about them!

 

I will be open at my current shop until January 22nd

12 - 4.30pm

I am closed on Wednesdays

 

 

 I now have established relationships with skilled producers and they are my trusted friends too, which counts for a lot in my world. I have a more developed aesthetic, skill base and experience. I know myself more. I am yearning for more creative time. As well as design, I want more time for photography, to somehow distil more of the true essence of the Haruka shop and all that converges there into my online presence. To take more photos of other designers clothes that I am lucky enough to sell. 

 

 

I long for adventures and travel, I want to go hunting and gathering for fabrics. I am currently overflowing with inspiration and new ideas for what I want to make next and a few new styles are slowly wending their way towards me in the way slow fashion does at a time of hiatus. There are so many ideas in my head bursting to get out. They are going to take some editing! I want to stop and assess. To move forwards and blossom. To ride the wave. To dive into my imagination. To work in my natural rhythm.

 

These are strong times and strong tides and many people I meet are making big changes in their lives. This feeling has been growing inside me over the last three years. I thought I would make this move a year later than I am making it, when Haruka (my son) finishes college. But I have always been guided by instinct and I know deep in my bones that it’s time for a change. I have walked around this decision a long time and looked at it from all angles, sat with it through all types of weather and it’s been a big let go but it feels absolutely right, and exciting and terrifying. Kinda my perfect storm!

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom   Anais Nin

N.B. This is not the shortest letter in the world! But it's been a long journey. to read to the end, make sure to press VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE if your email clips it about here X 

I don't always say this so easily but I am proud of all I have achieved thus far. I have brought my son up, built a thriving, unique business selling well-made slow fashion before I had even heard of the word. I am self-taught. There are very few designers who also manage to hold together a retail outlet in the way I have. I have followed my heart and lived an unconventional life. I didn’t even particularly plan to have a shop and here I am thirteen years later!

 

I have been sitting here, reminiscing…. Soon after I opened my first shop, next door to the one I am in now, when my son was around five, we moved, by choice, to a completely off-grid community. We lived in a big caravan (or three) on the Somerset levels next to a lake. I used to watch the swans raise their signets from my living room window, go swimming naked in the lakes with the light rippling on the water, the wind singing in the rushes and the sound of an occasional chinook military helicopter above.

 

 

 I had solar panels, eight black twenty litre water butts, in which I regularly collected spring water, mainly from Coxley. My son had nature and children to run around with. We washed in the shower cubicle, Indian style pouring from a pot, in water from the lake that I heated on the burner. I woke up every day at 5.30 to heat a big pot of water for that. I had a washing machine in the back of the shop from which I used to transfer the laundry on hangers to the back of my van. Glyn, my surrogate mum, who lived upstairs would often cover the shop when I did the school run. Then Haruka would hang out in the stockroom till the shop shut. 

 

In winter I would unplug both the heavy batteries that didn't get enough charge from solar alone in that season. Go home, plug them in, stoke the burner, cook dinner, then transfer the laundry to dry in the living room. It always made me laugh, the contrast to what people perceive a ‘boutique’ owner to be and the wild, free, ridiculously busy reality of my life. I don’t know how I did it! But I loved those years.

 

 Before my son went to senior school we regularly travelled to Nepal and India and I home-educated him whilst working on my collections and living our life. That was another good reason not to pay for a rented house. Most years we met Haruka’s Japanese father, Isamu, in India or Nepal,for one to three months and that was our family hang out time….

How time flies and how precious life is

 

There have been more incarnations since that time…

 

And the wheel turns again

 another metamorphosis is happening…..

 

 

BIG BUT……..

 

In letting go of this shop, I DON'T want to lose touch with all the people I meet and know and regularly interact with. I don’t want to lose my connection with you all. I don’t want you to lose your connection with me or with the clothes I produce. It’s an essential part of being a designer and a people person for me. To meet the people who wear my clothes and those of other designers I sell (and will continue to sell) and see them on bodies and get the feedback and build human relationships. It’s an essential part of buying clothes to feel the fabrics and the fit and try different shapes and different designers on together to see what works. So I am not going to let that happen.

 

I am moving to a studio at The Red Brick Building : https://redbrickbuilding.co.uk/

 

I will be in the Moorlands Room which is at the front of the building with its own entrance. I will have regular open days, perhaps one weekend a month and also be open by appointment, which means, just get in touch if you want to come down. I can also send measurements and show you things by video on whats app. I really want to encourage that. Basically, I am making it up as I go along but I’ve got a good feeling about this 

There is a vision for a regular artisan and brocade market at the Red Brick and I am planning on getting involved with organising that

 

 It’s an exciting place to be. The whole Beckery area, on the outskirts of Glastonbury, is being regenerated and is already a thriving community hub with artists studios and a cafe bar and restaurant. The area was recently awarded a substantial amount of money by the Towns Fund for a thoughtful network of community projects including a textiles hub, a purpose-built Youth Centre, woodworking and creative workshops, a community farm to grow vegetables for the town, a purpose built traveller's site and new Business Enterprise Studios in the Baily’s building. 

 

It's a new model in a changing world and I want to be a symbiotic part of it. Read more about it in the link below

 

 

All Haruka’s life, both the shop and my son, I have worked such long hours and often alone. And I love time with myself, but the essence of my lockdown prayer was not to do everything alone anymore. So to be part of a community is a perfect balance for me. 

 

It’s been a really hard let go and I have had to sit in the agony of indecision for the best part of this year while my mind caught up with me. But I don’t want to hold it all anymore so I am holding onto the bits that are singing to my heart and letting the rest float down the river. 

 

It feels like a really appropriate time of year to make the change. In tune with the seasons. Winter is the right time to cut trees back, to cut away the dead wood when all the energy is in the roots so that they can grow taller and stronger when spring comes

 

 

                                                                       Kahil Gibran

I AM GOING TO HAVE AN OPEN STUDIO DAY IN THE RED BRICK BUILDING ON IMBOLC, THE 1ST OF FEBRUARY

 

 

Imbolc is a Celtic festival marking the first stirrings of spring. It is also the festival of the Goddess Bridie who appears in a maiden form and is the Goddess of poetry, inspiration, Blacksmiths, healing and childbirth. The hearth is traditionally blessed on Imbolc and that feels like a good day to open my new House of Haruka.

 

I will send more details out nearer the time

 

Meanwhile …..

 

 

 

Come and see, You have TEN DAYS!  I changed all the rails in there for my new Brass ones on wheels, my facebook marketplace star buy of the year!

 It looks so good. Clear and fresh and improved!

 

I can't even begin to tell you how many drafts I have written of this letter over the last few months and lost somewhere along the way! I can't believe I am sending it out so late but it's been so hard to encapsulate it all in words, as they say here in Somerset

 

 

Thank you for listening

 and thank you for being a part of the journey with me

To be continued…..

 

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                  Jalaluddin Rumi