Our Story
The Friendship Behind the Brand
Brand co-designers Jenny “Niffer” Cook and Sarah “Smitch” Mitchell met in 2011 at a house party in one of those chance encounters where someone enters your life through fate and changes it for the better in ways that you could never have foreseen.
Jenny says of the time “I still remember seeing Sarah for the first time like it was yesterday – perched like a bird on the arm of a dishevelled sofa sewing tiny flowers onto espadrille sandals. We quickly got talking about the project that she was working on for her textiles degree and found that we had a tonne of shared interests. We were both designing and upcycling clothing and selling our wares at vintage fairs, we both loved fashion and styling and we were both awkward, anxious, excitable nerds with shared taste in books, tv and film.
In 2012 we started styling photoshoots together just for the fun of it, combining our vintage collections and handmade creations. We became intoxicated by the magic of creating together!”
Jenny's first styled photoshoot: Margaret's School for Delinquent Girls
Sarah's first styled photoshoot: Granny Cool
Finding Our Witchy-Boho Vibe
After graduating from university in 2013 they decided to officially go into business together and co-founded Cosmic Drifters in 2014. They had identified a gap in the alternative fashion space for clothing featuring bespoke print designs that felt like wearable art – a gap which between their shared love of hand drawn illustration and alternative style prowess they felt qualified to fill.
Typical alternative textiles prints at the time were all very kitschy, bold, simple and predictable. They wanted to create something more evocative for whimsical wearers than the typical skull and pumpkin designs that adorned the clothing of the mid 2010s.
In the years up until 2018 Jenny and Sarah steadily honed their aesthetic – a mid point between Jennys grunginess, Sarahs bohemian softness and their shared pagan practices that ultimately morphed into a unique witchy-boho vibe. They identify these years as the period in which their design output merged into one gloriously unified hive mind.
Defining Our Aesthetic: 2014-2017
2018: The Kickstarter Year
Until 2018 Jenny and Sarah were both working part time jobs alongside running their business while they nourished their minds with sewing, pattern cutting and illustration skills, but this was the year that they decided to go all in on themselves and their gifts and take their brand to the next level.
They quit their side hustles and strategised a crowdfunding campaign that if successful would fund moving into a more professional office, buying industrial sewing machines and producing their first made-to-order collection.
They hosted this campaign via Kickstarter and offered a selection of garments and prints in styles that would become definitive of their ongoing brand aesthetic, with timeless figure hugging dress cuts and flowy bohemian styles that acted as a foundation upon which their unique mystical prints could shine. They overshot their campaign target by 150% and managed to raise ÂŁ20,000 to invest into moving their business forwards. This gave them so much energy, enthusiasm and hope for the future of their brand.
Kickstarter Campaign Shoot
The Leeds Workshop
In early 2019 they found the perfect office space in their home city of Leeds in a building called Aire Street Workshops that offered subsidised rent to creative start ups. Jenny says of this time “I knew immediately upon viewing the office that it was where I wanted to nest and grow the business.
The building managers Mairi and Gary also worked in garment production and came on board with producing Cosmic Drifters’ made-to order clothing ranges between the years of 2019 and 2023. They were incredible mentors to me, imparting the combined wisdom of years of design and production experience that helped shape the path of our brand. Without their steady, consistent and nurturing presence Cosmic Drifters wouldn’t have grown into the six figure brand that it became during this chapter of our business journey.
My biggest takeaway from this period of my life is how important a role emotional safety and vulnerability play in fostering creativity. Working with people that you trust and that make you feel safe to experiment and express yourself freely and authentically is undoubtedly the number one factor in building a successful working environment. Through their work at Aire Street Mairi and Gary have provided that sense of safety and community to so many creatives who are just starting out on their journeys into entrepreneurship”.
Our Aire Street Workshop
Some Difficult Lessons
For these years the company operated purely on a handmade-to-order basis. They ran an in-house production workshop of ethically paid seamstresses and worked tirelessly to produce clothing in line with our slow fashion values, that was size-inclusive, sweatshop free and handmade in the UK in limited quantities. We even offered different length options for petite to extra tall customers.
It was a magical time but by 2022 the cracks in our business model had really started to show. Economic challenges such as rising material costs, rent and overheads combined with operational challenges that came with producing and shipping all of our garments in-house, by hand, direct to customer had drastically reduced profit margins and resulted in us reaching the upper limit of our made-to order business model. We had poured everything we had to give into making this strategy work but ultimately chose to close our Leeds workshop at the end of 2023.
By this point the delicate flame of hope, safety and vulnerability that Jenny needed in order to maintain her creativity had dwindled and flickered out and we learned the hard way that creativity does not bloom under pressure. Jenny had become chronically ill with burnout from the stress of working long hours to try and sustain such a complex and high pressure working environment and chose to take some much needed time off.
Cosmic Drifters primary in-house production team 2019-2023
2024: The Pivot Year
In 2024 Jenny took a sabbatical and backpacked across the world to refill her cup. Reflecting on the period before her travels Jenny says “having spent my 20s building a business that was intended to give me a sense of freedom and agency over my life I ultimately built one in which I felt stuck. The years of 2022 and 2023 were marred by a level of chronic stress that surpassed my capacity to cope.
Now at 35 my priorities are different and I crave a work/ life balance that doesn’t sacrifice my health, relationships and inner peace in the way that I did during those years of my life. Having invested a huge amount of inner work into bouncing back from this chapter, poured all of my energy into the people that nourish me back and rebuilt my lust for life I fully intend to have longevity as a fashion designer and meet my highest potential as a business woman.
In order to do so I have healthier boundaries in place and protect my energy so that I can continue to expand and bloom. The biggest lesson I’ll be taking forwards into this next chapter of my creative life is to build a business structure that is simple, low risk, consistent and effective, that provides a firm foundation upon which myself and my collaborators can grow, progress and thrive, not just survive. After having lost faith in myself and my path for quite some time I now know that I have everything I need within me to achieve these goals and manouevre myself and my business into a more mature chapter”.
2026: The Comeback...
In 2026 Jenny and Sarah started putting those lessons into action! Enter year of the horse! Jenny has set up a safe, cosy, peaceful office from which to work on creative direction and garment design in her new home of Berlin- one of the most vibrant, thriving, inspiring cities in Europe that is abundant with potential for experimentation, collaboration, connection and play. Sarah will continue to work on print design from her home in a tiny village in the UK, surrounded by fauna, flora and wilderness – an environment that is sure to inspire many more eclectic nature-inspired print designs. Together they will channel the inspiration provided by their respective big city and small village lifestyles and continue producing an ever evolving collection of designs that will take you effortlessly from woodland adventures to queer club nights to freaky festivals, bringing a rich feast of whimsy and joy into every corner of your lifestyle! They have also enticed web developer Gavin Edson into the mix as a business partner. Gav is an expert web developer, marketing strategist and SEO mastermind who has been building the website for Cosmic Drifters since its infancy and is just as invested in the project as its co-designers. He brings practical and strategic skills to the table that perfectly balance Jenny and Sarah’s ethereal whimsy. Between the three of them they have the skillsets, passion and drive to rebuild Cosmic Drifters into the jubilant, expressive, expansive, joy-filled fashion brand that it always had the potential to become, grounded in their shared lifelong values of collaboration, inclusion, friendship and self-acceptance!