It’s one of those classic Kiwi stories… Kiwi girl returns home from London, her love of fashion and all things associated with it fired up by years of shopping the High Streets and a long held dream of setting up her own fashion label. With a few pounds in her pocket and not really understanding the full implications of spending this and more on key money for a Broadway lease in Newmarket the dream was born. “Even today I still have that lined school pad and the 23 point business plan I wrote,” says Briarwood founder, Ange Marshall.
It was 1992 and driven by nothing more than a burning passion for making great fashion shoes and bags, Ange set up Briarwood from a small (very) space beside Route 66 on Broadway. The informal Mayor of Newmarket, Kevin Male (of Route 66 and 3 Bears fame) was Ange’s landlord. He had received literally 100′s of enquiries for this neglected space but rejected most as hopeful fashionistas in it for the imaginary glamour of the business. However, he didn’t hesitate doing the deal with Ange and her first shop opened late that year. The designs were by Ange and some of the finishing touches were done on a sewing machine in a back room the size of a wardrobe. The majority of the stock was manufactured by a couple of offsite outworkers. By the end of the first weeks trading most of the stock had been sold -perhaps Kevin’s hunch had been on the mark.
Nearly two decades on, Ange still lovingly designs and creates 100% of the product. It is unique to Briarwood & proudly carries the Briarwood name. While the design and development process is still the same, not all the product ends up being made here in our New Zealand factory as it was back in the beginning.
All our designs continue to be sampled here in our local factory and tweaked until they are just the way we want them. From there, we decide which resource is best suited to make the production. Sometimes it’s our local factory & sometimes it’s a factory further afield in India, China or Italy.
When Briarwood was first established 20 years ago we were one of 20+ shoe & bag manufactures here in Auckland – today we are amongst a number you could count on only one hand. Demand for our product continues to grow and that’s a challenge for our boutique Mt Wellington factory. So, depending on the expertise needed for a particular product or the volume required, we have set about to diversify our production capacity. We pride ourselves on our quality. So, by having more than one resource, we are now able to bring our customers more variety & also products that we could never contemplate making locally – we see this as a big plus to have such scale and expertise at our disposal.
So quite simply, Briarwood is about the creation of simply beautiful shoes, bags & leather accessories. We hope you love them as much as we do!