The Futurists: Steve and Nick Tidball of Vollebak

Your brand’s tagline is “clothes from the future”. You design special pieces of clothing such as workwear designed for outer space. How did you come up with the idea for such a unique line of clothing?

That really evolved over time. It’s not like we had one crazy lightbulb moment. It actually started relatively slowly. We were doing some very extreme ultra-marathon races across the Namib desert, the Amazon and across the Alps. Our sponsors gave us some clothes, which were quite nice-looking. But we learned that when you put human beings in extreme environments, clothes like that aren’t actually that good for you. You’re basically wearing the same stuff as someone who’s walking down the street in Berlin or London. Nothing for running across a desert or a mountain range or through the Alps. Your clothes can’t help you. They don’t live up to their marketing messages. My brother said, “What if we made clothes that were very different and we told that story in a really cool way?” And that was the idea.

Easily said – but also done?

Right, then obviously your idea has to become real. Which is extremely difficult. Because there’s a reason no one’s ever designed these things. The approach we had at the start was: Can we make clothes that can do things that no other clothes have done before? And over the last six years, we got better at doing it.

You left your jobs in advertising for it. Is there a central theme that connects the dots between the two career paths?

Yes, definitely. I think one of the most critical points was my brother’s training in architecture. He went to Bartlett, a cutting-edge architecture school. There you don’t design buildings. You write fairytales or you create new bits of history. What he did get is this real training in materials. The other point was obviously advertising, meaning you can have the best idea in the world, but if no one else cares, it isn’t actually a good idea. That’s why today we have clothes that are very complicated to make with names like Apocalypse Jacket or 100 Year Hoodie or Solar Charged Jacket – names that are very simple but also very descriptive.

Do you think the world really needed another clothing brand?

When we first started, so many people told us that the world doesn’t need another one. Everything’s been done already. And you just go, “It isn’t true. It just isn’t true.” In the same way that when Elon Musk started Tesla, there were plenty of car brands, right? But it is possible to do something new. People often confuse market saturation and the ability to do something new. Market saturation can also mean there’s lots of people all doing the same thing.

You’re definitely doing things differently. Let’s take your Mars Jacket, it even has an anti-gravity pocket. But why should I buy the jacket for, say, my husband? He’s not going to Mars anytime soon. At least I hope not.

The Mars Jacket is an interesting one. One of the first two people wearing it was Christopher Nolan. Bjarke Ingels, the architect building the new Google headquarters, is wearing our Full Metal Jacket. We have rich lawyers as well as young designers, but the thing that connects our customers is they’re all fascinated with the future. And if you want to communicate that by your clothing, there isn’t a huge amount of choice. So, in a way, we kind of act as a communication mechanism.

What drives you when designing?

The drive for me is: What will the next hundred years look like for humanity? And how do we design against it? Climate change, sustainability, space and health – those are the really big things that clothing can impact. So we design very specifically with that in mind.

Are you a futurist?

You’re not really allowed to call yourself a futurist, are you? Someone else has to call you that. But I’m interested in the future and in identifying what the next hundred years look like. And you know, you and I, neither of us are scientists. But we can definitely say the number of fires and floods will increase over the next hundred years, we will run out of resources, we will go – whether we want to or not – to space and colonize another planet and diseases will travel much faster around the earth. And once I know all of those things, I know what I have to design for. It’s a really interesting way of designing because it’s complex. This is why no one’s done it before.

How hard is it to innovate in the fashion industry?

It was helpful coming from outside the industry. Because we came into it not knowing how long anything took. We didn’t know how to make a prototype, to work with factories. Consequently, we (…)

→ How Vollebak still differs from other brands, what "sustainable hedonism" has to do with it and why Elon Musk should wear Vollebak on Mars, read it in the interview in rampstyle #26.