MADE IN BELGIUM WITH A SMILE
Next to our Scottish and Irish knitwear we are happy to create products in our home country Belgium. We are very happy to contribute to this unique art and craft which is not only beautiful but also important culturally to remain alive. Producing in Belgium (and Scotland, and Ireland) not only means you have a truly unique product in your hand, it also means that the people making your goods are well paid and looked after.
Together with several small factories in Belgium, each carefully chosen for their own speciality, we managed to make a diverse range of products. This includes lighter weight knitwear, jersey and towel fabric garments.
WITH A SMILE
Since the start our goal was to create durable, functional and original products which far outlives seasonal trends. All pieces are produced in small batches and with close attention to details. With a smile. Extra special is the fact that for our jersey we don’t import fabrics but that we knit everything entirely in-house.
Therefore we can proudly say that all our Howlin' products are truly 100% produced in Belgium.
AB SOUND AND NEW BEAT
For all our made in Belgium pieces we were heavily inspired by new beat and in particular its predecessor: the AB Sound, hence the acid Belgian logo which is on all care labels. For those who are not familiar, new beat is an electronic music genre that flourished in Western Europe during the late eighties and got its origin in Belgium.
There are many different, ‘mythical’ stories on how this new beat got born, but we like the story of a talented dj called Fat Ronny who was simply too wasted and played 45 rpm records at 33 rpm and pitched them +8 on his turntable. The result was a new robotic sound which was very bass driven. While disco was the big thing he played a hypnotic mix of slowed down
tracks by artists like Severed Heads, PiL, Carlos Peron, The Human Leaque and Boytronic. (If interested, more Ab Sounds here). Together with a group of likeminded dj’s they soon created a real cult vibe with tracks like Max Berlin’s “Elle et Moi”.
Soon after “New Beat” was born and due to the great succes there are tons of bad commercial tracks out there but nevertheless, if you dig a little bit deeper, there is some amazing music to be found from this lost era.
