Baina founders Bailey Meredith and Anna Fahey say it’s a proud moment whenever they see someone carrying one of their organic cotton towels, or posting a photo of it at the beach, or in their bathroom.
With distinctive designs and uncompromising quality, Baina has become the ‘it-girl’ brand of the design world since launching in 2019.
Seeking a change after spending their 20s working in the fashion industry, Bailey and Anna both moved to Melbourne to work for homewares brands, when they had a ‘light-bulb moment’ to bring their design experience to elevate the overlooked category of towels.
Why they choose towelling as their niche
‘Bathing is a tool that we’ve always used to decompress and reset,’ Bailey says in the latest episode of our podcast, TDF Talks. This shared appreciation for bathing as a self-care ritual was the foundation of their brand.
‘When we were critically reviewing the different categories, it became quite obvious to us that there were plenty of linen brands and plenty of ceramics and things at that time… but really strangely enough, there wasn’t anything that appealed to us in the towelling category’ Bailey continues. ‘We felt it was a somewhat overlooked category in terms of design and quality.’
They decided to break tradition of monochromatic towel sets, instead coming up with a contemporary patterns in contrasting tones, designed to mix and match delicate stripes and checkerboard patterns.
Their first taste of success
‘We weren’t 100 per cent sure on what to expect [when we launched],’ Anna adds. They were running the business out of her Richmond apartment, and within their first year, Baina landed a line-up of retail stockists across Australia and New Zealand, which helped give them the credibility and reach they needed to grow.
Less than a year later, their products were selling out online within 48 hours!
Navigating rip-offs of their products
Having taken the towelling category by storm, their success soon caught the eye of many fast-fashion brands who began to create their own products heavily inspired by Baina’s much-loved designs.
‘It’s certainly very disheartening, we’ve seen a lot of them now,’ Anna says. In the beginning they took these copy-cat products to heart, but now, the founders recognise their quality and ethos remains unmatched: ‘Whilst it can be quite easy to replicate a design, I think it’s really hard to emulate our brand and our authenticity.’
‘We’ve never been one to look at competitors,’ Bailey says. ‘So if anything, it just drives us forward to be more focused and distinctive.’
Ultimate ‘pinch-me’ moments
As two childhood friends from New Zealand, Bailey and Anna are constantly surprised by how their small business has grown, with stockists now across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe, as well as international online retailers like SSENSE.
‘Whether it’s an internationally recognised actor or a person that I pass at the beach here in Sydney, it’s so humbling,’ Bailey says. Their towels have even become a staple in the celebrity world, with famous customers ranging from Elle and Dakota Fanning, Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) and Cindy Crawford.
‘There was a time when this idea of building a brand and then having it in multiple countries just seemed like such a far-off dream. A whole is a pinch-me moment is just that we’ve managed to reach all these different people from all the way down here in New Zealand and Australia, to the other side of the world.’
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Listen to the full episode below, or find TDF Talks on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
