Founders’ innovation at Poplar Works: Or Collective’s one year residency anniversary

LCF Graduate Futures connects with Bliss, one of the LCF Founders Club members a year after her residency in Poplar Works began, to see what’s been happening. Poplar Works aims to help smaller businesses grow to their full potential. The partnership with LCF’s Graduate Futures and LCF Business and Innovation offered this additional support and funding alongside the opportunity of having a studio space.

Bliss Olivia Staple, BSc (Hons) Fashion Management alum has been at Poplar Works since 2023 and founded OR Collective Ltd. Let’s hear more about what has happened a year on.

Tell us how the studio space at Poplar Works and support from LCF has helped you and your business the past year?

Poplar Works has allowed the luxury of space without committing to high rent and long lease terms. Prior to moving into Poplar Works I was working from a home office and starting to look for spaces but struggling to expense this into the business at such an early stage – we had only been trading 6 months at this stage. Beyond this, Poplar Works allowed us to launch the Studio Koter brand close to home and with such close collaboration together with making for change… it isn’t very often you can say your products are manufactured above your studio!

What hints and tips can you share with future Founders given this opportunity?

Use the network and wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. There are so many incredible businesses at Poplar Works and everyone has different strengths and opportunities to collaborate and share. Not to mention all the nuggets of wisdom that office manage Keziah has to offer.

Now that you are a year in at PW and since your last conversation, what is new or what has changed for OR Collective Ltd?

Or Collective has undergone steady growth beyond what was manageable in house, so we have now outsourced our logistics to incredible b-corp certified company ACS limited allowing us time to focus on growing the customers. Another huge change has been the launch of the Studio Koter brand, a label that is rented directly through Or Collective but also sold wholesale and direct to customer.

How have you continued to keep an ethical and sustainable rental design led kids business?

Ethics and the mission to reduce waste is at the heart of everything we have done from the start. I truly believe that for new business sustainable practice is the only way and the competitive advantage against big companies is that you can bake it into your soul from the beginning (they aren’t so agile to change quickly!) To this date we have never put any of our products to waste, everything has been rented, resold, upcycled, recycled or donated. With the new brand, studio Koter, we collect all production fabric offcuts to create new products or items to eliminate commonplace production waste.

With east London being your home and becoming a popular manufacturing hub, what other opportunities has this given you as a rising creative of a small business?

It has given the opportunity to make launching an own brand feasible in a fast, sustainable and effective way with no compromising on quality.

How has your collaboration with Making for Change helped?

We have worked closely with Making for Change to carefully develop the brand Studio Koter, with high quality standards from the start and a mission to produce ethically, sustainably and to challenge the normal fabric waste in production it has been an extremely close collaboration to achieve an amazing result. Our products have now been sent worldwide to new wholesale stores as well as being sold in local retailers and through or collective.

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