Charly Jacobs: Uri
Last year, we hosted an All Day Communion with lots of wonderful guest speakers. We had some of these talks transcribed and published in our first ever newspaper, which celebrated one whole year of Communion. 100% of the proceeds from the paper go to Papyrus UK, a charity that works hard to prevent young suicide in the UK. You can buy the paper here, and listen to all of our previous guest talks here.
We know that watching videos and buying publications isn’t always accessible to everyone, so we thought we’d put the transcribed talks up on the blog too. We hope you enjoy them.
I’m a fashion designer. I was brought up in Norwich, my Mum is Filipino and my Father was Dutch, meaning I was lucky enough to be immersed in both cultures from a young age. My childhood was spent between Norwich, Holland and the Philippines. Regular visits to see my Asian family and the close knit communities they lived in had a big influence on me growing up. I left home in my teens and sought new beginnings at Brighton University where I studied Fine Art. My career interests turned to Fashion and I made the big move to London to finish my degree and build my career.
I’ve got this image of this really cosmopolitan really traveled, amazing childhood. What did it smell like, sound like and taste like?
It tasted colourful, full of good food made by good people. I think not only being exposed to distinct cultures but different backgrounds and people, has really rounded off the person I am today. I guess it influenced my spirituality as well, my Father was quite a grounded person so he raised me to truly see everyone as equal. In terms of what my youth sounded like, like many teens I was really involved in music and got to see a side of Norwich a lot of people overlook. I had a really incredible upbringing there, finding hubs of green and liberal groups who opened up the possibilities of the city for me. I worked in this amazing menswear shop run by Phillip Brown, a man who knew as much about music as he did fashion. It was one of the only shops around that had an old school record player and if you worked there you had to know your way around a record collection. I began work experience there and just remember falling in with this all male group who were all insanely into their music. From really raw, true jazz to Thelonious Monk and Ska, we listened to a lot of Ska. Rock played a big role in the soundscape of my late teens and I loved steady reggae as well. From The Heptones, Roots Manuva, A Tribe Called Quest - this work of ‘intelligent hip hop’ was everywhere at the time. When I look back, that job really sparked my interest in art and the creative communities within the fashion sector, as music reverberated around a fashion store owned by a guy who collected art - it was all very ‘right place right time’.
The power of an influencer. I know that sounds dreadful, that sounds like social media. But I mean the power of someone who is passionate about music to infect and spread - that is so undervalued. Ok I’m gonna hand over to you now - take it away.
Building this business has been so much more than just the products and the planning, it’s been a process of constant hurdles and hoops to jump through to make it to where we are today. My mentor Toby encouraged me to share the first spanner in the works that we managed to find a solution to, which was the brand name. We had this name for my company - Entwined. We had been using it for maybe three or four years and even began our social media channels under the handle. About four months ago I managed to get together the funds to get the name and business registered through a lawyer, ensuring no pre-existing companies with the same name existed before everything was finalised. They came across a business that had registered the name ‘Entwined’ two days before we began our process, and it wasn’t just the name that was familiar. Whoever had registered it had taken everything from the logo to the artwork we had put out there for the company. My first thought was, this is my baby and I’m so used to the name and all it stands for, so I’ll just have to adapt. I altered my branding slightly hoping it would be distinct enough but my lawyer said the other company had opposed the registration, and that was really the deciding factor for me. I already had women working for me whose salary was more important than an ongoing legal battle over a name, no matter how much I loved it. I decided to find a word in Tagalog that symbolised the Filipino foundation of the brand, so I walked through all the words that might work with my Mum until we found one.
One word, one name - Uri. It struck a chord with me because it is somewhere scrawled in a notebook as a potential name for my daughter Mylo before she was born. Uri is quite Scandi sounding which I love, but it also translates to ‘nature’ which is at the core of my design.
Uri began a few years ago in 2017 when life was far from simple. Honestly, it was probably the worst year I’ve ever had. I was going through a really tough time relationship wise, I was working two or three jobs but felt directionless in my career and on top of that my Father was in the last year of his life. He had always had various health problems so growing up it was quite tough, but nonetheless we were always really close. I love my Mum but I’m pretty sure that she would agree; I was 100% my Dad’s daughter. Personality wise, culturally, aesthetically, politically we were on the same level, so his diagnosis of ongoing dementia was incredibly difficult as I’d always felt like a mirror of him.
If anybody has experienced dementia they know the ending is really hard, so facing that amidst a horrible relationship and burdening workload was awful. Luckily my jobs were flexible enough that I could hop on a plane for one week of every month to sort healthcare for my Dad in person, as he was living on the border of Holland at the time. As his closest family member I took on a lot of the responsibility, but that meant watching the man I knew become a shell of himself, and that year he faded a lot. We lost him in December, and by January I was going through the grieving process in quite a physical way, and the toll the last year had taken on my body really came to light. I was constantly exhausted and kept going to the Doctors but they repeatedly put it down to my grief. My ex left a week later and I finally swapped Doctors and, after some tests, it came to light that I was pregnant - four months pregnant.
All of a sudden the foundation I had been rebuilding crumbled, the work I’d done to heal and process the past year drew to a halt as I realised I now had something else to look after. In a selfish way, after having given myself to somebody for such a long time and caring for them, I really wanted a break. And now my body was creating another person. I was quite far on when I found out, so I was still working really hard, but in my seventh month I realised I could do with some help so headed to my parents house in Buckinghamshire. I had gone through therapy and it was amazing but when it came to an end I decided I wanted to give myself a different kind of creative therapy. I read a lot of books and I listened to everything that I could listen to that would make myself ‘better’. I read ‘The Artist's Way’, which asks you to write around three A4 pages everyday and this journaling really helped me process everything. Pregnancy wasn’t in my plans but I wanted to use the time it gave me to be creative. I worked on my headspace with journaling, I worked on my health by exercising absolutely everyday, I painted and did self portraits and was able to really lose myself in an almost meditative way. It resulted in a series of really simplistic paintings that I posted on my Instagram stories everyday and they started to gain quite a lot of attention. People started saying, “I really love the paintings, can I buy them?” and as my portraits had a focus on the maternal form, a lot of other Mums got in touch asking me to paint them too. So in the final trimester I lost myself in painting and just painted and painted and painted.
Then I gave birth to my daughter Mylo and the craziest thing happened, when I had her it was like the whole of me opened up. Here I was thinking that I would lose my creativity, but she was born and it was as if I was cut open and rainbows came out. Just before having
Mylo, my Mum had gone away for a trip to the Philippines and she asked me what I wanted her to bring back. My one request was a big woven basket bag. These styles of bag are really common over there, the more you use them and the more tattered they get the more I love them. However, the bittersweet love affair with this bag is that it always, always breaks after two years.
Mum brought me back this bag and I looked at it and was like, can I make this product better? I was breastfeeding Mylo for hours a day and spent this time wondering how I could unite the artisanal Filipino styles that I grew up learning about and my own knowledge of high-end design to give this bag a longer life and make the product better.
When Mylo was 8 months old I asked my family abroad to help me out, and bought two plane tickets to Asia. I had no real plan but in my head. I wanted to work with native Filipino women because I knew from my own background having lived there, that everybody weaves. It’s part of your bloodline to weave. You wouldn’t sleep on beds, you would weave sleeping mats instead. I remember my cousins doing it, I remember my grandma, my aunties, all the women I knew, weaving pretty much everything that we used.
So I was back in the Philippines with a whole new outlook on the creative culture there, and I set off on this task to meet as many native makers as possible. To do this, I got in touch with the part of the government they called ‘trading tourism’, a centre in the province of Iloilo that deals with all these maker communities. When I went to visit them I found out about these remote communities in dire need of some sort of economy, and a lot of these groups were female led. I met a lot of single mothers who didn’t make a huge amount from their weaving craft, resorting to planting rice or harvesting with their small children strapped to their backs to make ends meet. A lot of elderly women were left looking after their grandchildren because their own children left at twenty two to make money for the family. I met some truly incredible people and it was amazing to have Mylo with me. I’d have her in a sling on my back and ride on a motorbike to get to some of these places, because the car wouldn’t make it up the track where these individuals were based. I was lucky enough that some days my cousins would look after Mylo so I could take myself and my notebook to meet some really beautiful makers. I’d be greeted by rooms full of weaving machines manned by women, their kids running around their feet. On the one hand it was so nice to see these women working alongside their children, but then you remember that they had no other option.
I’m really interested in where products come from, what the beginning of a supply chain looks like. My original plan was to buy some of these products and develop them, but whilst I was there my mind was racing and my design priorities changed. I realised that transparency within production really mattered to me. Being able to see exactly how the workers are treated, their environments, and knowing the farmers are being paid fairly. So, I visited Abacá farms and found the strongest material, watched the poms being taken apart and stripped, the fibres being harvested right in front of me. I found out that in the Second World War this was basically the main fibre used in ropes - the resilience of it was an asset, paired with the rate at which it grows, it takes only a year and a half to get to the point where you can use the fibre. Knowing that I could source such a sustainable and durable fibre so locally, I went back to base and stripped apart one of my favourite styles of basket bags. I got this bag from a shop that prided itself on being environmentally friendly and using natural fibres, so finding that they had used polyester and various plastics between their plant material to increase durability broke my heart a little bit.
The more I got into the process of researching native fibres, the more I realised what I wanted - to use them as the foundation of my products. I bought my first big lot of Abacá from this incredible woman who I fell in love with, I just couldn’t stop taking portraits of her. Her name is Anne. After that, we started to make the first samples. I took what I’d learned back to the UK and I studied and studied them. Mylo was still small so I didn’t have a huge amount of time, but I committed to habits that meant I could prioritise my time with her but also make progress with these products and the business I had begun to build. Little, little steps everyday, even if it’s one at a time. By the time Mylo was approaching one, I had made a lot of headway in my work, and one of my cousins flew over from the Philippines to help my Mum look after Mylo whilst I packed my bags and flew back to Iloilo for two months.
I was at the point where I needed to build a structure that would be viable to produce products, but it was insanely hard leaving my daughter when she was so young. Nevertheless, it was incredibly productive too. There was a particular group of ladies who I really fell in love with; it wasn’t just their work but the environment they created for themselves to work in. A lot of them had incredibly tight money situations and multiple children, a circumstance not unfamiliar to the one I found myself in when I had Mylo. I wanted to help them.
There is no government structure in the Philippines like there is here - no child benefit, nothing. If something happens to you, you have to survive by yourself, to depend on the community you’re living in or just work with your child on your back. Knowing how important my own support network at home was rounded off this vision I had been building, my urge to help those without work and those who found it difficult to do the work available. I employ a lot of elderly women, I work with single mothers, with widows, and the more women I meet the harder I work to make Uri fit their needs too. I went and visited a family member, she had cataracts and was completely blind yet spent her days looking after her two grandchildren - it was heartbreaking. So now I’m trying to find a way to work with blind people and provide healthcare for them as well. Over those two months, I stayed with this group of women and created a foundational structure for production, working on the quality of bags, on consistency in design and upskilling these women and myself. The result was the best quality basket bag I have ever seen. So sturdy, so well made, and every part of it traceable to the area around me. Throughout this process of developing and working with my team of women I’ve paid them at every step, because I truly believe in what they are doing and I want them to recognise the value of the skills that they have as much as I do.
Charly has been working ridiculously hard to build Uri over the past year that we have known her, and the business launched in Spring 2021. Find out more at www.uri.studio