Gudrun & Gudrun opens first UK store

Luxury Faroese-based eco-friendly knitwear brand Gudrun & Gudrun has opened its first UK store, with a pop-up space on Redchurch Street in Shoreditch, London.

The pop-up, which will be open until the end of December, marks the first retail location in the UK for the environmentally conscious knitwear brand, and follows the successful opening of flagship stores in both the Faroe Islands and Norway.

The store houses a range of products from the brand's autumn/winter 2015 collection including pieces from the menswear, womenswear, kidswear and accessory lines alongside a selection of their traditional knits, which range from traditional hand-knit sweaters and cardigans, machine knit thin base layers, alpaca wool and Faroese wool pieces.

Commenting on the opening, Gudrun Rógvadóttir, Gudrun & Gudrun co-founder and creative director, said: “London has been on our wish-list for a store opening for a very long time. There is needed awareness about the brand and we have many web-shoppers from the UK that we want to give the opportunity to feel the goods and to have a face-to-face chat with.

“We want to welcome them to our physical universe. We fell in love with Redchurch Street and wanted to pretend that we are locals. So we rented a room 3 minutes from the shop and for the coming months we will be chameleons acting as we had always lived there.”

Gudrun & Gudrun was founded by in 2002 by two Faroese women and the creative process of design is very closely linked to the isolation of the place, as the Faroe Islands are 18 tiny islands situated in the North Atlantic, between Iceland and Norway with only 45,000 people living there. The label specialises in hand-knitted collections that are made in the homes of women's knitters on the Faroe Islands and in Jordan and Peru as part of our women's empowerment projects.

Image: Gudrun & Gudrun