OUR BEGINNING

Long before any of this, I sold a painting in a gallery.

I'd always drawn. Kandinsky was the one that stuck — he taught at the Bauhaus, a school that put painters and engineers in the same building and told them to get on with it. Art and making things were never two separate jobs there. They've never been two separate jobs to me either.

Twenty years in factories and on plant, onshore and offshore, from Scotland down to the south coast. I settled in Yorkshire ten years ago. Different sites, same work. Engineering teaches you to look at things differently. You stop seeing products for what they are and start asking why they were made that way. Why this material? Why that seam? Why this button? Could it work better?

And when the shift finished, there was nothing I actually wanted to put on. Workwear that looked like workwear. Fashion that fell apart in a season. What I wanted was the stuff in the old photographs — deck jackets, shawl cardigans, proper cord — cut to fit, made from cloth that could take years, without a logo shouting across the chest.

That's why I started Greybank.

Every product begins with a problem, not a sketch. If a seam can be stronger, we'll change it. If a pocket sits wrong, we'll move it. If a feature doesn't make the garment better, it doesn't make the cut.

The drawing gave me the eye. The engineering gave me the discipline. Greybank is both — every piece drawn, specced and worn by the same hands that built it.

Designed in Yorkshire, made for anywhere.

Jay
Founder & Design Engineer