I never set out to start a fashion brand. I set out to buy a white T-shirt.
I was working in finance at the time, and I wanted one really good, reliable T-shirt I could always reach for. Under a blazer during the week, with jeans for a Sunday coffee, under a chunky knit when it got colder, or on its own. Nothing complicated. One piece that worked, whatever the day called for.
I kept buying them, and they were never right. The fit was off, the quality wasn't quite there, or something about them simply didn't feel right. Not a big problem, just one of those small, quietly irritating things that kept coming up. And I wasn't the only one. My friends were doing the same: buying white T-shirts, trying them, and going back to looking for another one. We all wanted the same thing, a simple, well-made T-shirt you could rely on and wear with almost anything.
I remember thinking: there has to be a better way. So instead of looking for another one, I decided to make one myself.
Leaving finance
That decision was easier said than done. I had spent years building a career I was good at, one that came with a stability I didn't fully appreciate until I gave it up. Leaving a job you know for a field you know almost nothing about comes with a particular kind of vertigo. There was no roadmap, no design degree, no experience to fall back on. Just a very specific idea of what I wanted this T-shirt to be, and the conviction that I had to make it happen.
The Agnes Tee
I had no design training, which made the process its own kind of challenge. But I knew what mattered to me: the sleeve, the neckline, the fit, the weight of the fabric. Above all, the quality. There were no shortcuts.
After countless samples I found a cotton supplier in Italy who cared about quality every bit as much as I did. That partnership is where the Agnes Tee was born, in 2016, named after my twin sister, who has heard every version of this story since and still asks how the fabric turned out.
Ten years, one idea
One T-shirt has since become an entire wardrobe. The white shirts followed soon after Agnes, then other versions of the tee, and eventually knitwear and outerwear. Every piece is still designed in Oslo, and every piece still has to earn its place, exactly as that first T-shirt did.
The goal has not shifted: wardrobe essentials in the best possible quality. Clothes that make getting dressed easier, that you feel put together in without trying too hard, and that are made to be worn for years rather than a single season.
Ten years in, there is a great deal that never makes it onto a hangtag. The samples that failed, the mills we walked away from, the reasoning behind a hemline no one else will ever notice. Those are the stories this journal is for.
Start where it started: the tees.
Xx Julie
