“We recycled over a thousand festival tents which is equivalent to around 5 tones of plastic or 350,000 single use plastic bottles”
Beth Cosmos
Founder story…
In essence , if you could imagine every lesson, every experience & every learning that my last brand taught me as being an ingredient thrown into a witches cauldron then mix it all up,
the good in with the bad, the soup became the potion which I drank, the up’s the down’s the high's the low's ... .life sure cast it’s spell on me and so in return, I magic'd up Studio Cosmos.
I wouldn't be able to tell the tale of how Studio Cosmos came to be without first telling the tale of my previous brand; Because, the very fabric of Studio Cosmos pulls forward, learns from & embraces aspects that my previous brand did well & just a like a a big sister looking after a little sister would do, the previous brand has whispered the way, passed on the knowledge.
By 2018 I had two branches of my business, one was a recycling company, the other a kids fashion brand. The recycling company side of things had contracts in place with most major UK festivals to recover a certain percentage of their camping waste and by 2019 the business had recycled well over a thousand festival tents which is equivalent to around 5 tones of plastic or 350,000 single use plastic bottles! As a designer that's by far my biggest achievement to date.
We got a bit of media attraction for doing our bit for the environment with features on the BBC and ITV news, lots of radio shows and magazine write ups,my humblest of brags was being featured on the BBC’s one show nursing a stage ten hangover on the back of zero sleep being interviewed by a One show reporter stood outside a festival portaloo talking about sustainability on national tv, career peaking moments I will cherish forever.
Moving swiftly on, off the back of this little media flurry we grew a neat little organic following and it was so nice to see what was once an idea in a field grow to be a real life brand ,
I took on a few more machinists, stocked in more stores and expanded the offering into adults’s wear!
Backstory full disclosure, The year is 2016, i’m sat in a field on the last day of Glastonbury festival contemplating life's next moves, fresh out of uni with a degree in fashion design, holding the dice of life wondering what i’ll role next.
I'd spent the past 3 years of my degree either up-cycling factory off-cuts or designing kids' wear … I knew I wanted to start my own brand but I wasn't sure which project to run with, I had a few loose ideas. Being super passionate about sustainability and circular economy but I also really enjoyed the creative freedom of designing kids clothes, it felt right to combine the worlds.
As the Glasto fields emptied of people, I noticed a lot of tents remained.
I reimagined the kaleidoscope of tents in the field as raw fabrics, able to see the fabrics for their usefulness at this point, the most obvious being their ability to weather the British outdoors, a simpler way to phrase the term “British outdoors’ would be with one word, rain.
Then the idea came to me to start a brand re-cycling all the camping equipment that gets left behind at UK music festivals into rainwear for kids… And so, somehow that was my life for the next nearly 8 years; it was the right time to have the idea and in many ways the brand was a success.
At the time I around 250,000 tents were estimated to have been getting left in festival fields each summer in the UK.
