BEHIND THE BRAND

PART OF THE PROCESS

Written by Des Dare Barragan

Picture this.

An acre of luscious backyard, palm trees overhead, and sipping lemonade made from “borrowed” fruit out of a neighbor’s backyard, “They were just all on the ground, and they were asking to be made into something, so I grabbed them!”

Everyone, this is Emma Brooks. Savior of forgotten lemons and owner of the clothing line, Pair Up.

Emma and her husband Bubba call this acre in Escondido, CA home, where all the magic of Pair Up happens. Pair Up is a small batch women’s line designed and primarily produced from Emma’s garage studio. The thought behind Pair Up is participating in the daily art of piecing sustainable items together to create outfits that make you feel like your most authentic self. Emma designs and makes each unique garment by hand alongside one other seamstress, Visible’s own Sabrina Rounds!

Drawn to create things from a young age, Emma tells us that her “mom was really cool” and deemed her room a space to express however she wanted; she could staple things onto the wall and dress her closet door in stickers and drawings. Along with an environment where artistry flourished, Emma enjoyed activities like scrapbooking, face painting, and doing coloring book tracings that her friends would buy for ten cents a pop. This creative edge continued into Emma’s adult life as she pursued a degree and career in graphic design and loved it! But after ten years as a successful freelancer, designing and branding for small businesses, it was time for a shift.

“When I started Pair Up, I didn’t know much about the fashion industry or about what it took to make clothes. I was trying to find something that felt similar to graphic design but strayed away from being on the computer all the time. It still involves color, texture, shapes, and includes the photography and e-commerce marketing side of things that I know so well. So I just kind of dove in.” Emma did know that she wanted to make beautiful things that didn’t contribute to a large amount of waste, an initiative that she attributes to California culture and her husband, who is a scientist.

Emma tells us she’s saved all their cutting scraps since day one, which they try to reuse for patchwork products, and she is circling ideas for what to do with what they cannot reuse. “I’m excited by the idea of bringing an educational element into it where I’m discussing what it takes to make clothes, our relationship with them, how to repair them, and dispose of them at the end of their life.”

Like young Emma, who invited her friends to join in on decorating her closet door, at 35 she desires a fun and encouraging way to invite others into what she’s learned about clothing production & consumption.

In an industry where it is common practice to use new, virgin fabric to meet the demands of mass production and consistency, the Pair Up team only sews with deadstock and upcycled textiles. Deadstock is unused fabric that has been abandoned for a handful of different reasons. Sometimes brands overestimate their needs, a fabric mill might accidentally produce too much, or a dye house doesn’t match a requested color perfectly. Whatever the reason, it needs to find a new home and that’s where we come in. “There are these amazing massive warehouses full of fabric in LA. It feels like you’re walking through a city or a fortress of fabric rolls. It’s floors and floors and floors of fabric. It’s a little depressing seeing all of that unwanted material, but it’s also really fun searching for what I want to make my next pieces out of.”

For Emma, it is all about the color. “Your eyeballs are scanning a million miles an hour; first, I’ll see the color, and then I’ll have to go in and feel it.” She gives herself hours to search for fabric, cutting swatches and laying them out on the floor before deciding what to buy!

With the excitement of deadstock shopping also comes the harsh reality that these rolls were initially wasted. Emma shares her trips to the warehouses on Instagram because its powerful imagery. The average consumer doesn’t see or know about the effects of fast fashion and the excess that our clothing can produce. These are all things that Emma keeps in mind for Pair Up, especially with thoughts of the world she’s building for her newborn daughter.

“I have such a newfound respect for all parents that have had kids. I see them all through a new lens. Once you’re the one experiencing it, you’re like, ‘ohhhh, I get it.’” Emma shares how her transition into motherhood has been a beautiful but wild ride! Her days with 5-month-old Penny collide with the effects of sleep deprivation, time limitations, and rediscovering her workflow. What used to be a fluid process of sitting, steeping in, drawing, and pulling from her closet and images online is transforming into a more structured routine of sequenced priorities to accomplish. Emma affirms that parenting is a hard identity shift saying, “I just feel like my brain was cracked in half,” but describes how she simultaneously gains new joy and perspective through Penny’s life. “I see everything so differently. I get to live life again all over with her, and every person that I meet now, I’m like, ‘Do you have kids?’ and I wanna talk to them about their kids, versus before I would have been like, ‘What do you do for a living, let’s talk about work.’ Now I just want to talk about parenthood.”

When asked for something to leave our readers with, Emma immediately thought of a poster by the artist Daren Thomas Magee. “It’s of a palm tree and a swimming pool, and it just says, ‘Relax, you’ll be dead someday.’ It really resonated with me. I think it’s because I just gave birth in a hospital setting where I was surrounded by life and death.”