This goes out to our friends

From Harem Pants to Shirts.

It has been a while since we were active here. To be honest with you, sometimes it feels like we have outgrown the whole thing.

The brand virblatt is now 10 years old and the project even 14. Back then, all four of us founders were still in our mid-twenties, eager and ready to explore the world. We felt an inner urge to break free and found it incredibly exciting to emigrate to Chiang Mai. So we went with a one-way ticket and a suitcase to Bangkok, by train, to a city we had never been to before. It was quite something to arrive at the station. Okay, this is where we live now.

Chiang Mai, the heart of our fashion, so to speak. A melting pot of various cultural textile crafts like weaving, embroidery, batik, and more. Here was everything our Far Eastern longing craved. We combined fabrics made of hemp, cotton, or bamboo, traveled to remote mountain villages to find unique weavings, and set ourselves the goal of combining a new, modern, perhaps even cool style with traditional elements.

We were bursting with ideas, and looking back, this was one of the most creative times of our lives. I mean, somehow we rose from eBay sellers to fashion designers. Even though instead of fashion shows and runways, we mostly attended electronic parties and small hippie gatherings.

Time passes. Time changes. It changes you. And it should.

When we used to see Thailand as the ultimate place of freedom—riding a scooter without a helmet across an exotic island and if something happened, just bribing the cops—we have now realized that freedom can also have other, more essential facets.

Today we feel very comfortable in Europe and have settled in Portugal. Our children attend the local school here, we go surfing whenever possible and almost every day, and we are closely connected to the sea. We love life by and with the Atlantic. We have matured. Like a pear, just not so mushy.

I am writing this here, sitting in our kitchen. It is raining outside. I hear the huge waves crashing today. I take this moment of our brand’s 10th anniversary to think about virblatt and about us. About all our employees, basically our friends, who joined the project and became part of us and virblatt.

I reflect and have a smile on my face. This close-knit team of friends who started as students chasing their dream, how we hiked through snowy mountains in Nepal and Jo shared his last Snickers with me with an unforgettable look, how we designed new models on some rooftop terraces, planted many, many trees in Pai, inaugurated a school in Cambodia, and felt the urge to turn the fashion market upside down. But also how we cried because we first had to learn what cash flow really means and how brutally it can hit you.

I am so grateful to all of you who made this chapter of our lives possible. You were always part of everything and probably the coolest customers one could imagine.

Now we have children, wear jeans rather than harem pants, shirts instead of kimonos. We go surfing instead of drinking. One could say we have grown old. And somehow the question arises: have we outgrown our clothes?

Times change. And they should.