Founders Yoni and Manon took sewing lessons from Freka, Yoni's mother. This soon changed into a food club that was full of chatting. When Freka proposed that she make a coat for Manon, she needed proper fabric. At the time, Manon was living in Tilburg, in a house without central heating. That's why she had three wool blankets on her bed. When she saw them, she thought that they might be suitable for making a coat.

One thing led to another, and the first Wintervacht coat was born. After she had worn it a number of times and gotten a lot of good feedback, she called Yoni. “We really need to do something with this, because people like it!” Because Yoni wasn’t crazy about the coat’s design, she and her mother got to work creating the first true Wintervacht design, the short coat. They both started to wear the coats to school and that got the ball rolling. Classmates also wanted coats, then friends of classmates and so on.

“The old-fashioned blankets have labels from the brand, Aabe. They’re really nice, graphic images that are very recognisable at this point. We thought this was a lovely detail and wanted to use it in our designs. Because we were looking for a cotton label (on the short coats) that wouldn’t fray, we started looking on the internet. We prefer to work with high-quality, natural materials.”

These Aabe labels were, incidentally, also made by EE Labels, as we only realised when this collaboration started.

”We now order all our labels from EE Labels because we’re very pleased with the quality. We work with fairly simple designs. That’s why all of the details have to be right, including the labels on the coats.

When we submit an idea, we always get a sample that we’re very pleased with. Because we order a lot of labels at once, we want to make sure they’re right. EE Labels helps us deliver the right design and ultimately the right label.”

”We would like to order New Life (polyester yarns from recycled PET bottle) labels in the future. Those fit seamlessly with our concept for using existing materials.