Demand has run away with us. So we’ve made a decision.
I want to sit down and write to you properly, human to human, about where we are, what we’ve been navigating these past few months, and what’s coming next.
The Thing That Changed Everything: Swim Took Off
As many of you now know, this year we expanded our organic swimwear range and launched into the USA. We are still one of only a small handful of companies in the world making natural swimwear (literally, I can count them on one hand).
What’s happened since has been beyond anything we hoped for.
Swimwear sales from around the world are gathering pace every day. The response from American families since launch has been extraordinary. Our swim has turned into a breakout product range, and even just weeks after our biggest restock, we’re struggling to keep up with demand and already selling out of styles.
There’s a growing awareness around synthetic fabrics right now, particularly in relation to children’s skin and long-term health. More and more families are coming to us looking for organic, natural materials that are safe for their children and free from harmful chemicals. It’s something I’ve been campaigning on for years, and to feel that conversation finally landed in the mainstream is something I don’t take lightly.
Demand is at an all-time high. We have an incredible team in place. And our swim collection has earned, in our view, the right to its own home.
The Pressure That Came With The Demand
Of course, with growth comes growing pains. Honestly, six big ones, all at once:
- Supply-side constraints. The energy crisis in India has hit hard. Most factories there have been asked to prioritise domestic supply over exports, which has created real pressure on our production timelines.
- Trademark complexity in the US. The name Pure Earth Collection is going to be tricky to register in America. There are several brands operating with similar names in children’s sleep and outerwear, which opens us up to trademark and litigation risk.
- Insurance cover in the US. This was proving hard and extremely expensive for our children’s sleep range.
- Customer confusion. We now have customers coming to us exclusively for swimwear who don’t necessarily have young children. They land on a website full of sleeping babies and start wondering if they’re in the wrong place.
- Stock listing management. Managing different SKUs across multiple sites and regions has become a serious time pressure for the team.
- Cash flow. Demand is running away with us. Keeping up with sales means ordering enormous volumes of stock upfront and the cash outlay required to do that, alongside the start-up costs of an American launch, has been significant. As founder and director, the buck stops with me. I’m personally invested in keeping this going. With our current margins and business costs, we’re not yet profitable, but every penny is being put back in to grow the mission: reducing plastic exposure for families and making low-tox living easier for everyone.
When all of these come at you at once, it can feel overwhelming, to say the least. But what I’ve learned over nine years of running a business is that seemingly impossible challenges almost always have a workaround if you think hard enough and stay positive.
The Decision: A New Home For Our Swim
After many late nights (a founder’s favourite time to think), I’ve landed on a solution that addresses almost all of this in one move:
We’re spinning our swimwear range out as a separate brand, still under the Pure Earth Collection company umbrella, but with its own name: Earthcove
Earthcove will become our dedicated swim brand, growing in both the UK and the US. Pure Earth Collection will continue to be the home of our sleep and play products, run from the UK and shipping globally as we’ve always done.
It’s a decision that, more than anything, reflects how big swim has become. It deserves its own world. Its own visual identity. Its own room to grow into the next phase of what we’re building.
And along the way, this new structure quietly solves the rest of it too.
It removes the trademark risk in the US.
It frees up more children’s sleep stock for our UK warehouse, giving us a much-needed buffer against the supply delays we’re expecting in the autumn.
It clears up the customer confusion, there are now two distinct Instagram pages for each brand, already live.
And as we separate the websites over the coming months, stock management and website maintenance becomes dramatically simpler.
Earthcove will run as one website across two regions. Pure Earth Collection will run as one website in the UK. Marketing, communications, and the customer journey all become so much cleaner.
However, and this is important, Earthcove will still be sitting under purearthcollection.com and us.pureearthcollection.com until later this year.
Same Ethos, Two Homes
Both brands will continue to share the same ethos: helping families reduce plastic in their everyday lives, particularly synthetic fabrics, and avoid harmful chemicals like PFAS, phthalates and formaldehyde.
The two brands will stay closely linked, working together to spread this message far and wide and help more families make safer, more sustainable choices for their health and the planet.
It’s not about fear. It’s about awareness. And every small change adds up.
We’re so excited for the next part of this journey, and so grateful you’re on it with us.
P.S. You’ll see Earthcove starting to appear across our swim labels, our packaging, and our social channels over the coming weeks. The product itself doesn’t change – same organic cotton, same UPF 50+, same family of people making it. Just a new name on the home of our swim. Come and find us at @earthcoveswim
