Kent travel wear brand 'House of XOXO' launches
Reality star Josiah Carter and Kent fashion designer Billie Jacobina have collaborated on a travel fashion brand built on hugs and kisses
Hugs and Kisses. Or in texting speak, XOXO. Born of the friendship between Josiah Carter and Billie Jacobina, House of XOXO (@houseofxoxo_) was designed for those who like to travel.
The name was both the sign-off in their WhatsApp group messages and tied in nicely with the ethos behind the brand, because what do we do before and after travelling? Hugs and kisses.
Whitstable fashion designer Billie Jacobina made her name at Graduate Fashion Week in 2016 for her brightly-coloured textile prints. She has won Fashion Scout’s Ones to Watch award and shown her collections at London Fashion Week, Jakarta Fashion Week and Kyiv Fashion Week.
She and Josiah met as teenagers back in Devon and hit it off as friends straight away. Josiah, on the other hand, has travelled the world working on superyachts before being chosen as a crew member for the hit reality TV series Below Deck and Bravo TV’s new show Galley Talk, where he and other former crew members watch and review the latest seasons of Below Deck.
The first spark of the brand came when Josiah received a package in the post, a sweatshirt sent from Billie embroidered with a simple XOXO on the front.
“It was during the lockdown and we were constantly messaging into the WhatsApp group. And I was, like, I’m gonna make us all a plain white hoodie and then Josiah wore it on Galley Talk,” says Billie.
“I want to be comfy, but also I don’t want to get out of the car at a service stop and feel like I’m in kind of pyjamas. We want to make sure that it looks quite stylish and quite sleek.”
“It’s a similar concept to Gogglebox, where I’m sitting on the sofa, you know, in your lounging stuff, watching TV and commenting on it,” says Josiah. “And you obviously have to wear a different outfit each time you film. So I thought ‘I’m just gonna put on my XOXO hoodie’. And then people were saying they loved the hoodie and where did I get it from. And then that’s when I kind of lit a lightbulb.”
Having tagged Billie’s own fashion brand Bop in a social media post, the pair were then inundated with requests for replicas of the jumper.
“I just thought we need to do something about this, and it can’t just be these jumpers,” she remembers.
“When Billie and I were trying to think of the name, we kept kind of going back to XOXO,” says Josiah. “It seemed silly not to do something that’s actually personal to us. And then, like you say, with travelling there’s always hugs and kisses when you leave people or when you see people or when you’re signing off to get on to a flight. So it kind of all brought it together, really.”
Creating their first product line in late 2021, the House of XOXO crafted a soft launch to gauge the interest of their initial ideas.
“We didn’t want to go all in just in case something didn’t happen or it needed changing,” says Josiah. “Slowly over time we kind of worked on what was good and what was bad, so we were fully prepared for this launch.”
The full release came in late September with the Cocktail Collection initially being divided into two colourways, Colada and Mojito.
“When you’re travelling, you want to be comfy,” says Josiah. “I drive to Mallorca every year with my dog and, you know, driving that distance, I want to be comfy, but also I don’t want to get out of the car at a service stop and feel like I’m in kind of pyjamas. We want to make sure that it looks quite stylish and quite sleek.”
While further colourways and products will arrive late in 2022, the initial range offers T-shirts, hoodies, joggers, a yachtie beach bag and amenities pouch.
“We want to kind of be as ethical as we can,” says Josiah. “So we’re using ethical cotton - it’s not fully organic because organic cotton isn’t actually that great for the environment, because it uses way more water. The other ethical part is also the factories that it’s being made in, where everyone’s paid properly, there are proper documents that are all signed off to make sure people get in the right hours and they’re paid the right amounts or getting the right breaks.”
A prominent tagline and anti-fast-fashion stance for the brand is Buy Once, Wear Forever.
“We’ve done some experiments and basically washed [the items] pretty much every day for like three weeks,” says Josiah. “So all of our materials are anti-bobble and they’re anti-fade as well. Really good quality.
“What’s important for us to kind of get over is that, as well as the ethical, we want it to still feel really luxurious. So when you get an order they won’t just come in a plastic bag - each item comes in really nice dust bags. And they are biodegradable as well.”
There are plans to build the product range with items like a vegan travel bag - the original prototypes sold out during their soft launch - and eventually find stockists.
“We want to make sure that we’ve got our brand 100% to where we want it to be,” says Josiah. “Over the next year, there’ll be new products and different colourways and tweaks to our original products. If all of our customers come back and say ‘Oh well, I wish you had done this, or that would have been better’, then we would listen to that. But if Selfridges say they want to stock it tomorrow, we’re not going to say no.”
