About Frolickers
Frolickers is a clothing-led cultural project about curiosity, choice and not letting one profession, interest, habit or social role define the whole of your life.
The clothes express that through adaptability. The Journal looks beneath the surface of fashion and the systems shaping what we buy and want. Adventures create opportunities to try something unfamiliar, meet people and step outside the usual routine.
We've built Frolickers around Freedom, Truth, Love and Responsibility.
Freedom gives us room to explore and choose.
Truth helps us understand what we are choosing.
Love asks us to consider the people our choices affect.
Responsibility means acting on that understanding and accepting the consequences of our choices.
Four rather large words for a company that makes clothes. We expect to be held to them in everything we make, write and organise.
Frolickers brings together Marisa Koivisto’s experience in luxury fashion and beauty and Wojtek Wrobel’s practice as a multidisciplinary artist, producer and technologist.
Their different backgrounds shaped not only the clothes, but the way they approached making them. Creative ideas were developed through experimentation, technical decisions were considered alongside aesthetics and comfort, and specialist expertise became an essential part of the process. Together, they wanted to make clothes whose beauty, comfort and usefulness would hold up in everyday life, with the same care extending into the stories and experiences around them.
We believe a business can make desirable things without making people feel inadequate, and succeed without treating somebody else’s wellbeing as a cost to remove. For Frolickers, making something beautiful also means making it useful, making it properly and caring about its effect on people and the planet.
In the clothes, that means starting with how a garment will actually be worn. Reversible jackets and designs that can be worn in different configurations give each piece more possibilities. Familiar silhouettes and considered colours help them work with the wardrobe you already have. We manufacture in Europe and invest in specialist materials and careful development, considering comfort, physical durability and lasting appeal together. We want the clothes to remain worth reaching for long after their launch.
Making those decisions has also meant looking closely at the industry around us.
Our Journal opens that experience to you: how our clothes are developed, the ideas behind Frolickers and what we have encountered while building the brand. We will examine what retailers promise independent designers, what sustainability claims actually tell a customer and how commercial pressures shape what gets made, promoted and bought. We will share the correspondence, invoices and photographs behind our experiences so you can examine the evidence and draw your own conclusions. Understanding what happens behind the finished image makes it easier to decide what deserves your support.
Frolickers Adventures brings our philosophy into experiences we can share. We’re putting together free, slightly unexpected things to do with other people, taking familiar skills somewhere unfamiliar. Learn something, make something, play something or teach something. Some adventures will need what you know; others will need your curiosity and willingness to turn up. We take care of the organising, with the activities shaped by the skills and interests people bring. Through them, we want to help address the loneliness crisis by making room for play, discovery and relationships outside work.
Across the clothes, the Journal and Adventures, we want to give people more possibilities and the information and opportunities to explore them. What you already do does not have to decide everything you are allowed to do next. You can be technical and creative, spend Monday in a meeting and Saturday making music, love one thing your entire life or discover something new tomorrow.
That is where Freedom begins.
FREEDOM
Your starting point should not be mistaken for your limit.
By the time we begin making many decisions for ourselves, we have already inherited ideas about what a life should look like. Family, school, culture and circumstance teach us what is sensible, respectable, possible or supposedly beyond us. Some of that guidance serves us well. Some becomes a restriction we continue to obey without remembering who put it there.
“I’m not creative.” “I’m bad at numbers.” “People like me don’t do that.” A description of what we have experienced can quietly become a rule about what we are allowed to attempt.
We all begin with different abilities, opportunities and predispositions. Access to time, knowledge, money and encouragement matters. But a predisposition is not a sentence, and being inexperienced at something is not the same as being incapable of learning it. Practice gives us a way to test those assumptions against something real.
You do not need to become exceptional for the experience to be worthwhile. You can paint without becoming a great painter, play basketball without becoming a professional or make music without turning it into a career. Enjoyment is a good enough reason to begin. An interest does not have to become an achievement before it deserves a place in your life.
That freedom applies to our opinions and preferences too. We accumulate conclusions, become comfortable with them and sometimes forget that they were conclusions at all. Try something you assumed you would dislike. Listen seriously to a perspective you disagree with. Spend time with somebody whose life has given them a different understanding of the world. You may leave more certain of your original view, but you will have done something more than repeat it.
A coin viewed from its edge can look almost like a line. Turn it and you see a circle. The object has not changed; the view has.
That is what curiosity offers: more experience and information from which to choose. It gives us a better chance of recognising what we enjoy, what we believe and how we want to spend our time. It also helps us question the expectations surrounding those choices. An advert or a carefully curated feed can suggest what a desirable life should look like without knowing anything about the person expected to want it.
There is no obligation to keep changing. If you find something you love and want to do it for fifty years, wonderful. Freedom includes that choice. We simply want to leave the door open when an unfamiliar interest appears, rather than close it because it does not fit the life we have lived so far.
We bring that willingness to look again into the clothes. A jacket can have two sides worth wearing. A dress can offer more than one configuration. The same cut can sit fitted on one person and oversized on another; a couple can share a garment, and one piece can move between different outfits and occasions. Looking differently at a familiar garment can reveal possibilities that were easy to overlook. The design gives you options, and you decide what to do with them.
Our chameleon carries the idea of expression into the brand’s symbol. Colour is part of how chameleons communicate, changing during social interactions and signalling their state to one another. That connection between colour and expression appealed to us: something visible on the outside can communicate something about how we feel. Wearing the other side of a jacket can be a small, everyday way to express that.
Who are you today?
You do not owe the question a grand answer. Perhaps today you want to learn the drums, try painting or return to something you have always loved. What matters is recognising where you have a choice, and giving yourself permission to make it.
TRUTH
Wojtek’s mother used to tell him that the worst truth is better than the best lie.
The sentence stayed with him because a comfortable illusion still leaves you making decisions about a world that does not exist.
Truth gives you something you can act on: a reason to question an assumption, correct a decision or change direction.
That matters in an industry so skilled at creating the image around an object. A logo can stand in for quality. A price can stand in for craftsmanship. A sustainability badge can stand in for an explanation. The story becomes familiar, and familiarity can start to feel like proof.
Marisa’s experience in luxury fashion and beauty gave her a practical view of what sits behind that story: materials, suppliers, costing, testing, production and supply chains. Building Frolickers brought us into direct contact with the retail and promotional systems around the product too. We encountered charges presented as support, prestige offered as value and sustainability claims more impressive than the checks behind them. Those experiences made us determined to examine what was actually being offered.
The story around a product is not proof of what it is.
That principle has to apply to Frolickers too. If we ask people to look beyond a name, a price or a polished image, we need to explain our own decisions and give them something concrete to judge.
Our garments are manufactured entirely in Europe, with fabrics and components from specialist European manufacturers including Olmetex, Brisbane Moss, Riri and Cobrax. We use suppliers also used by Burberry, Balenciaga and Hermès among others. We chose them for their materials, hardware and expertise, with the intention that their value should be felt directly by the wearer.
Luxury pricing includes marketing, retail, distribution, heritage, image and status. Those things contribute to what people pay, but they do not tell you how a garment is constructed or how it will feel to wear.
For us, quality has to exist inside the product before the story around it begins. Choosing good materials was therefore only the beginning. We still had to turn them into clothes worth living in.
Marisa brought knowledge of garment production and supply chains. Wojtek brought engineering and technical production experience from environments including EY, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, alongside web development, agile project work and his practice in music, photography and film. Knowledge from those different fields shaped how we approached the clothes. Function, appearance and the experience of wearing something were considered together from the outset.
We began with the problems we wanted the garments to solve: how they should fit, what they needed to hold, how they would work with an existing wardrobe and where they might become uncomfortable or fail. Those questions gave us something concrete to develop and test. Each feature had to justify what it added, including any complication or restriction it introduced.
The first Frolickers jacket took roughly a year to develop and went through seven samples before we considered it finished. Each iteration examined fit, proportions, pocket placement and depth, closures, reversibility, fabric behaviour, construction and comfort.
A swatch cannot show you how a complete garment will hang, how light will move across its surface or how two colours will work together at that scale. A change that improves the fit for one person can create a problem for another. Making, wearing and refining the samples allowed us to judge those relationships in the garment itself. Sampling was part of the thinking, not a formality between a drawing and production.
We invested heavily in experienced manufacturers, pattern cutters, textile specialists and component suppliers throughout that process. Their expertise helped us turn the intentions into construction decisions, while we kept returning to the experience of the person who would wear the result.
A pocket should hold what you need. A jacket that looks warm should provide warmth. Both sides of a reversible garment should feel fully considered. Details that suggest usefulness in a photograph but fail in everyday life were among the things that frustrated us about clothing in the first place.
The same scrutiny led us to ask why clothes stop being worn. Some fail physically: seams give way, fabrics wear badly, closures break. Others remain perfectly functional but become difficult to combine with a wardrobe, stop feeling desirable or simply leave their owner wanting something different. Keeping a garment in use means considering all of those reasons.
For physical longevity, we examined seams, pockets, stress points, closures and unnecessary joins. We chose substantial fabrics and good hardware, simplified construction where complexity served no purpose and addressed potential weak points during development.
Aesthetic longevity raised a different question: what makes something feel dated before it has worn out?
Fashion trends have a professional infrastructure behind them. Companies such as WGSN sell forecasts covering colours, materials, silhouettes and styling to help brands plan future collections. What appears in shops is shaped by commercial decisions made well before a customer encounters it.
The starting price we encountered for access to WGSN was £16,000. Before buying fabric or making a single garment, an independent brand is being asked to make a substantial investment just to access predictions of what people will want next. Those predictions then inform what brands produce and promote, helping shape the choices customers eventually see. From the outside, it can look as though everyone simply developed the same taste at the same time.
A jacket can still fit, feel good and perform exactly as intended while the images around it begin telling you that it belongs to the past. A different proportion becomes desirable. A colour moves out of favour. The object has not failed; its place in the fashion story has changed.
We object to making desirability depend on a product’s approaching replacement.
So we looked back at silhouettes and proportions that had survived repeated changes in fashion. We kept the designs restrained, giving them fewer details that tie them to one particular season. Black, navy, olive, tan, brown and grey were chosen to work with clothes people already own. A new garment should not require five more purchases before the first one makes sense.
Adaptability gives you further possibilities within the same object. A reversible jacket offers two considered surfaces. The same cut can sit fitted on one person and oversized on another, and a garment can be shared. Different combinations change how it looks and feels without requiring another purchase for every setting. That is why we show the same pieces on different people: the clothes should enter your life without prescribing what that life must look like.
The materials, construction, palette, silhouette and reversibility all answer the same question: how do we give a garment as many good reasons as possible to remain useful, desirable and worth owning?
When you pay for Frolickers, the fabrics, components, construction, development and expertise have to justify the price. We want you to understand where that value is and feel it for yourself.
No amount of philosophy gives us permission to make a bad jacket.
The Journal extends the same scrutiny to the industry around us. We will share what was offered, what happened and the contracts, correspondence, invoices and photographs behind our experiences, so you can examine the arrangements and see who carried the cost.
We are asking you to look closely, including at us. Truth becomes useful when it gives you a clearer basis for your own decisions.
LOVE
For us, Love begins with remembering who has to live with a decision.
There is somebody making the garment, somebody supplying the material, somebody working alongside us and, eventually, somebody opening the parcel. Businesses need to calculate costs and margins, but those calculations describe relationships between people. A worker does not become less of a person because a spreadsheet reduces them to a labour cost.
We depend on people we will never meet. Somebody grew the food, maintained the server, cleaned the room, cut the fabric and sewed the jacket. We can spend our lives developing particular skills because other people develop theirs. That dependence should give us a reason to care about the conditions in which their work happens.
It also gives us a standard for the work we put into the world. Marisa once compared making a product to choosing a present for somebody: if you care about the person receiving it, why would you knowingly give them something bad?
Thinking about that person brings small pleasures into the design too. You put your hands into a pocket many times a day; we wanted the lining to make that ordinary gesture feel good. Its softness adds something for the person wearing the garment even when nobody else can see it. We considered touch throughout the clothes, including how much the feel of a material can matter to someone who is sensitive to texture. Those quiet details are part of what we want the wearer to enjoy.
Remembering that experience matters when a cheaper fabric or weaker component would improve a margin. The saving may be easy to measure; the disappointment belongs to somebody who trusted us enough to pay. We want to think about that person while the decision can still be changed.
The same consideration belongs in how we sell. Fashion can bring pleasure, beauty and expression into a life. It can also keep finding reasons for that life to feel insufficient: you are behind, your clothes are wrong, you have not quite become the person you should be. Each diagnosis comes with another purchase attached.
We want people to desire Frolickers because the work deserves it. We care about the photographs, the styling, the design and the pleasure of wearing something excellent. We do not want to manufacture inadequacy and then sell the cure.
Caring about people means opposing the harm done to them. We can examine exploitation, challenge a company and refuse a practice without making humiliation the point. The pursuit of truth asks us to look closely at our own motives too: being right can become its own kind of vanity, and it should never become permission to be cruel.
Love means keeping the human being in the picture, especially when forgetting them would be more convenient.
RESPONSIBILITY
Someone carries the cost.
Keeping it out of the photograph does not make it disappear. A cheaper product can transfer a burden to the person making it. A retail arrangement can transfer risk to the brand supplying it. An object designed for a short useful life still leaves materials, labour and waste behind when the next one arrives. Responsibility begins with asking what our decisions require of other people, and whether we are prepared to stand behind the answer.
We chose European manufacturing because we wanted closer relationships with the people making our clothes, high manufacturing standards and working conditions we could stand behind. We wanted to make good products without treating somebody else’s wellbeing as the place to find a saving. Location matters, but the work and conditions behind it matter too.
Every garment also requires materials, energy, processing, transport and packaging. Our questions therefore begin before production: why should this object exist, how much use can we design into it and how much genuinely needs to be made? That is why we prefer small production runs and deliberate quantities. More units are not automatically a better result.
Creativity can help answer those questions. Before producing another object, we ask whether the one in front of us can do more. Reversibility, adaptable cuts and a useful palette are different ways of building more genuine usefulness into the same garment. None of them alone can promise a particular environmental saving; what people actually buy and use still matters. What we can do is give what we make fewer reasons to need replacing.
Material choice takes judgement too. Our collection is made overwhelmingly from natural fibres, and we avoid unnecessary synthetic additions. But a natural fibre can still carry environmental costs, while a synthetic component can earn its place through necessary stretch, durability or weather protection. We need to understand what it contributes to the garment and why it is there. A reassuring word on a label cannot do that thinking for us.
The same responsibility exists between us and the customer. Good intentions do not make an inferior product acceptable. The material, hardware, construction and expertise have to justify the money somebody spends. Better fabrics, repeated sampling and specialist knowledge cost money. We chose to put that investment into the clothes because the person buying them should experience its value in use.
A company also has to survive. We sell garments, and we want Frolickers to succeed. A viable business can pay its suppliers, support the people doing the work and continue developing better products. The principles become meaningful through the choices we make in pursuing that success: accepting a smaller margin, spending longer on development or refusing a shortcut because the consequence would land on somebody else. The need to make money cannot become an explanation that excuses every decision.
Those choices extend to how money moves beyond our company. If independent design and unusual ideas are to survive, the people making them need the means to continue. Buying directly from a creator helps fund their materials, time, development and next piece of work. It gives practical support to the independence that makes their contribution possible.
Our Journal will make some of those relationships visible through our own experiences and the records behind them. We will say what we think, show what happened and explain why it matters. We also need to distinguish what the documents establish from what we conclude from them. Criticism brings its own responsibility: an account should help people understand what happened, even when a simpler, angrier version might attract more attention. The scrutiny we ask of other companies has to apply to Frolickers too.
With Adventures, responsibility means respecting the people who make the experience possible. Participation does not give us ownership of somebody’s ideas, images or work. Any further use should be agreed with them, including credit and compensation where appropriate. Sharing a skill or joining an activity should not quietly become an obligation to provide free work for the brand.
We cannot trace every consequence perfectly, and the choices available will not always offer an ideal answer. We can examine what we know, explain our decisions and change a method when better information gives us a reason to do so. Materials, manufacturing and knowledge develop. Having principles should make us more attentive to those developments and their consequences.
Frolickers may grow further into writing, film, music, experiences, objects or things we have not imagined yet. Each new form brings its own decisions about resources, people and the standard of the finished work. The freedom to explore comes with the responsibility to give those decisions the attention they deserve.
Knowledge creates responsibility. Once we can see what a choice supports, we have to decide whether we still want to support it.
FOUNDERS
Frolickers brings together Marisa Koivisto’s experience in luxury fashion and beauty and Wojtek Wrobel’s practice as a multidisciplinary artist, producer and technologist.
Wojtek conceived the wider vision for Frolickers, shaping its philosophy, identity and creative direction. Marisa brought an understanding of the fashion industry from the inside, along with ideas that became fundamental to the collection, from reversible garments to adaptable pieces that can be worn in different ways. The clothes themselves took shape through their shared creative decisions, extensive experimentation and a willingness to draw on expertise beyond their own.
For Marisa, the ambition began in Hong Kong, buying fabric at the markets and making clothes at home as a teenager. Her mother, an independent woman whose interests took her from aviation to teaching and financial markets, showed her how much a person could learn and do. She also insisted on a practical education. Marisa studied management at Manchester and completed a master’s in supply chain at Warwick, then built a career across luxury fashion and beauty, including six years at Burberry and work with Estée Lauder, Jo Malone London, Darphin and others. The dream of designing her own clothes remained, now supported by years of understanding materials, suppliers, production and costs.
Her judgement begins with the person wearing the garment. Does the fabric feel good? Is the piece comfortable? Will the pocket hold what it needs to? Is this something they will keep choosing from their wardrobe? She knows the pleasure of beautiful clothes, but also the disappointment of something that promises more than it delivers. When describing the standard she wanted for Frolickers, she compared making a product to choosing a present: if you care about the person receiving it, why would you knowingly give them something bad?
Wojtek’s creative practice grew from a determination to learn things he had once believed were beyond him. Growing up in Poland with limited opportunities, he began by teaching himself bass. Music led to theatre, performance, sound and lighting. When he moved to Britain at eighteen, he found himself starting again as a young Eastern European immigrant, with few prospects and little financial security. He took whatever work he could find, including poorly paid warehouse and hospitality jobs on zero-hours contracts, with no guaranteed hours or dependable income. Poverty and precarious employment were not abstract concepts to him. Those experiences gave him a lasting understanding of how strongly circumstances can shape a person's opportunities and choices, and how easily the realities of those with little financial security can be overlooked.
He eventually returned to technical work and progressed to technical manager, with experience in environments including EY, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. Alongside his career, he continued to play instruments, produce music and develop his work in photography, filmmaking, video editing, Photoshop and retouching. Much of that creative knowledge was self-taught, acquired through sustained practice and the refusal to leave an idea unrealised simply because he did not yet know how to make it.
Through Above Productions, his work has included producing marketing campaigns for Candy Kittens featuring Jamie Laing, alongside collaborations with established Polish musicians. His photography has appeared in The Wire and on album artwork for artists including Marek Pospieszalski. These are some of the outcomes of a practice that moves between disciplines: composing and producing music, shaping light and images, directing attention through film and refining the details of a finished piece. He brings that breadth into Frolickers, where the clothes, photography, moving images and wider creative direction can be developed in relation to one another.
In the clothes, that collaboration means considering function and appearance together from the beginning. Marisa’s knowledge of fabrics, comfort and production meets Wojtek’s attention to construction, proportion, colour and visual detail. They examine what a feature offers the wearer, what it complicates and how it belongs within the whole garment. A practical solution still has to be beautiful; a beautiful detail still has to make sense in use. They work closely with experienced pattern cutters, manufacturers and textile specialists, combining their own judgement with the expertise needed to carry the design through properly.
Their first jacket went through seven samples over roughly a year. They refined the fit, pockets, closures, proportions and reversible construction, seeing how the materials behaved as a complete garment and how changes affected different bodies. Both sides had to deserve being worn. The soft lining inside a pocket mattered even though nobody looking at the wearer would see it. They chose specialist European materials and components from suppliers including Olmetex, Brisbane Moss, Riri and Cobrax. The ambition was to put the value into the experience of owning the clothes.
They left their jobs and invested their own savings to make that possible. Building Frolickers demanded further sacrifices, including periods when Marisa returned to paid work while Wojtek continued developing the company. When commissioned imagery fell short of what they wanted, he deepened his own production and editing skills until he could create work that met their standard. The response was characteristic of their partnership: understand what the work needs, learn what is missing and keep going until the result is something they can stand behind.
Those different backgrounds also shaped what they wanted Frolickers to become. Marisa’s ambition to make clothes was inseparable from the materials, fit and practical possibilities of each piece. Wojtek developed the wider creative and philosophical vision, building the company's purpose around Freedom, Truth, Love and Responsibility and imagining what it could become beyond clothing. Their work on the garments brought those perspectives together rather than assigning them to separate parts of the business. Together, they want to make desirable things without manufacturing insecurity, and to build a business that remembers the people affected by its decisions. The clothes, Journal and Adventures give that purpose different forms.
Their history matters because of what it asks them to put into the work. They know what it means to save for something, to trust somebody else’s expertise and to hope that what arrives will be worth it. They want the person opening a Frolickers parcel to feel that their own money, expectations and everyday comfort have been taken seriously. Every fitting, material choice and refinement is an opportunity to earn that trust.