I was only 28 during my first pregnancy and I couldn’t get basic things that I felt I looked my age in
Cameron Diaz once said, ‘I’m like every other woman: a closet full of clothes, but nothing to wear. So I wear jeans.’ Most men would look at a quote like this and grin and move on, but for online entrepreneur Pippa O’Connor Ormond, this sort of reality was the genesis to her new line of bespoke jeans.
A working mum and the face behind Pippa. com and Pippa’s Fashion Factory, the former model has now turned her hand to designing and on Monday she will unleash her collection of jeans on the Irish market.
‘I am nervous- excited,’ she says. ‘Hopefully I will be flat out until Christmas, but it’s the not knowing that’s the problem.
‘I was saying to my sister early on – are we going to have 100 orders on Monday or 1,000 or what? She thinks we will be busy all day just getting them out.
‘We have a new office and warehouse because we have a lot of jeans and they take up a lot of space and don’t just sit in a corner. We are doing it all ourselves. I am not delivering them to people’s doors myself but everything to that point – the packaging, everything.’
The range is called POCO, a portmanteau of her and her husband Brian Ormond’s names. It is a labour of love that has been completely selffunded, without any institutional backing or support from a well-heeled fashion brand.
‘ This is all me and Brian, which is even scarier,’ she says passing her son on to her stepdaughter Chloe, who is in the background. ‘If it hadn’t been for Pippa’s Fashion Factory... those road shows created the money to be able to do this. So it was always, what will we do next on the back of that?
‘All of our own money has gone into it which is mad because a business like this isn’t cheap. My idea is that we are going to do it really well and not cut corners.
‘Brian couldn’t stop laughing at me from the beginning because we had tested a dozen different denim samples and each one that I picked was the most expensive in the blind trials. He was like, “typical you, picking the most expensive”.
‘But that is true because I’d always try to buy the best and not cut corners and that’s what I have done here. I needed to have the best in quality so that’s what I picked and that’s what I’m selling.’ While Pippa’s name is all over the brand, she is quick to give equal credit to her husband – although she is equally quick to confirm that her better half had absolutely nothing to do with the product’s design.
‘Brian obviously hadn’t anything to do with the design process,’ she says with a smile. ‘Of course, that’s not where his skills lie.
‘He makes things happen and he’s always in the background pulling strings and making things happen.
‘He got in touch with various contacts and flew to Turkey to meet manufacturers because I was pregnant. I would be great for the ideas but probably put them on the long finger whereas Brian would have the phone call made and the meeting set up before you had finished the conversation. He’s great like that and we complement each other well in that way.’
The range will start off with five styles – one is maternity, the others are everything from your relaxed off- duty jeans to your Saturday night going out style. She has fixed a price point starting at €85 but all sales will go through her website Pippa.com.
The special maternity style was inspired by her second pregnancy.
‘I said I wanted to design jeans and then when I was pregnant with Louis I did find it very hard to get good maternity jeans that were actually stylish and that didn’t look like maternity jeans. That’s why I added those in. Your body is changing all the time and I really felt that there were only clothes out there for comfort and not for style.
‘I was only 28 during my first pregnancy and I wanted maternity because they fit me better than going up a size in regular clothes. I really couldn’t get basic things that I felt I looked my age in and jeans was definitely one of those things that I just felt weren’t good.
‘A couple of things that might have come in skinny styles were very uncomfortable and weren’t cut for someone who has a big ninemonth belly. With mine you can wear them from the beginning of the pregnancy – from six to eight weeks – right up until the last day.
‘We had Karen Fitzpatrick modelling them for our shoot and she had her baby a week later and she looked incredible in them. She said the stretch and comfort of them was unbelievable and they didn’t fall down which, believe me, is the big concern with maternity jeans!
‘Obviously you don’t go straight back to your pre-pregnancy body straight away either, so they are the type of jeans you can still wear after the baby arrives and nobody will know they are ➤