No matter what people say, running a brand is tough. Constantly shifting consumer tastes, ever-rising costs, a growing population of idea thieves and general over-saturation. It’s a miracle that any brands manage to get over the line these days, let alone the ones that don’t have board members with millions of pounds of backing.
Strip away the pound signs, and creativity stops being optional. For Usual Objections, thinking differently is the most important ingredient of survival.
From the outside, Usual Objections appears as an independent sportswear label pushing against an industry dominated by global corporations and marketing budgets bigger than most small brands’ turnover. But from the inside, it’s slower. More deliberate. Something far more personal. Built from a humble studio in Hackney, East London, Usual Objections is the result of two people selling everything they owned to give themselves a shot at doing things their way.
Rich and Linda are partners in life, and as of March 2020, they’ve been partners in business. Despite what their brand’s name suggests, the pair’s route into fashion was anything but usual. Linda comes from a background in digital products. While Rich started in aerospace engineering – a discipline that, as it turns out, translates pretty well to the construction of technical garments. He taught himself to sew, learned pattern cutting, and figured out how to build a working studio from scratch.
“We’ve learned by doing, fixing, failing, and figuring it out again. We don’t come from fashion, but we’re obsessed with running and swimming. And doing things right.”
The idea of doing things right underpins just about everything Usual Objections stands for. The brand is rooted in Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement. It’s a concept often spoken about in abstract terms, but for Usual Objections, Kaizen is applied in its truest form – relentlessly, day to day.
With Usual Objections it’s about constantly iterating the process of how we make things, but also how the business functions as a whole. What’s working well, what isn’t. When you’re doing anything new, you make a lot of mistakes. Seeing those mistakes as part of the learning process can be hard, but it’s the only way you move forward.”
The brand’s name itself, unlike the big sportswear brands, actually means something too. It’s about chipping away at the usual objections that stop people from starting things – running, cycling, swimming, going to the gym, walking to work – whatever. Usual Objections philosophy is to circumvent those ruminations, overthinking and general hesitations through purpose-built gear.
Truthfully, calling Usual Objections a sportswear brand is selling Rich & Linda’s work short. But for lack of a better word, we’ll stick with it. All garments are made to order in Hackney, with only minimal stock held. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is wasted. Products always go through multiple iterations, released, refined, and quietly improved for the rest of their shelf life. In regard to whether a product is ever truly finished, Rich joked:
“There’s a point where something is finished for a specific moment in time, but fabrics evolve, you get more feedback, and that either feeds into a new iteration or a new product.”
During this process, it’s important for the brand to distinguish between endless novelty and genuine refinement. It can be tough to know when something is genuinely better, rather than just different. But for Usual Objections, avoiding getting lost means each product spawning as the solution to a problem.
“We always have a brief about what problem we’re trying to solve. If a short is for racing, it’s stripped back. If it’s for daily use, that’s a different version.”
A lot of what Usual Objections produce is led by feel. And being physically present with the machines, patterns, and materials changes everything for them. Ideas can become prototypes the same day. Patterns are drafted, fabric printed, garments sewn and adjusted all in a matter of hours before being tested on the streets of East London. Iteration often starts the same day.
“I don’t think I’ve ever started a garment with a line drawing. I’ll knock up a quick prototype and start playing with a marker. It’s much easier to think through the whole garment that way.”
This hands-on approach is central to the studio’s culture, which runs more like an engineering workshop than a fashion atelier. Inspired by lean production principles, there’s no rigid hierarchy. Machinists are involved in design discussions. Everyone has visibility on what’s working and what isn’t. When something fails – a seam, a pattern, a material choice – the response isn’t to hide it, but to understand it.
This approach continues to allow Usual Objections to punch well above its weight. Laser cutting, Italian-engineered featherweight fabrics, beautifully rich colour palettes – the level of detail is closer to a science lab than a small independent brand. But it’s never about tech for tech’s sake.
“Every product has to have a purpose beyond just sales. We’re trying to create lifelong pieces that evolve into the best possible version. Pieces people keep coming back to.”
If you hadn’t guessed already, sustainability isn’t treated as a marketing hook either. It’s woven into the structure of the business. The studio runs on renewable energy, uses modern heat pumps, recycles wherever possible, and pays the London Living Wage. But more broadly, sustainability is about building something that can last – economically, socially, and culturally.
It’s about the greater good of the business as a whole. Getting people into sport, helping with physical and mental health, supporting community and environmental projects, and leaving the world better than we found it.”
Looking forward for the brand, growth has inevitably presented tensions. Making fewer things, more carefully, is a harder business model. It means slower progress and a steeper learning curve. But for Rich, the trade-off is worth it.
“Ultimately, we’ll have the better product, and that’s the single most important thing to me.” In time, certain products may be produced with trusted partners to make them more accessible, while the Hackney studio remains a space for experimentation and the hardest-to-make pieces.
Until then, focus is maintained firmly on the activities that birthed the brand – running and swimming. These repetitive, solitary, and incremental disciplines mirror the very way Usual Objections has been built. Rich likens daily life to running a marathon: fulfilling and meaningful. But maybe not something you’d want to do every day. Echoing our opening sentiment: running a brand is tough.
But despite the weight of each and every decision, success doesn’t purely hinge on a purchase for Usual Objections. If someone walks into the studio hesitant – about sport, about starting something, about themselves, getting their card tapped is the last thing on Rich’s mind.
“I hope they leave feeling inspired to start something or make a positive change,”
From reading this, you’ll have realised that Usual Objections didn’t dip their toes in. Rich & Linda dived straight into cold water, were forced to learn to breathe under pressure, and have figured things out the hard way. Selling everything you own tends to remove that option of turning back.
But now, the brand has found its feet. They’ve hit the ground running. And as the brand continues to evolve, Rich is clear on what won’t change:
“I just don’t want to make junk.”
Find out what Usual Objections are currently up to here.
