Article: Made in Cymru: Why We Started and What We’re Building
Made in Cymru: Why We Started and What We’re Building
In the spring of 2020 the world stopped. Wales stopped. And I had time to think.
I had been turning an idea over in my head for a while. Something that had been sitting at the back of my mind without ever quite making it to the front. A marketplace for Welsh sellers. A place where independent Welsh businesses could be found by people who wanted to buy Welsh, support Welsh and celebrate Welsh.
A Welsh Etsy, if you like.
With the world on pause I finally had the space to build it.
The Beginning
Made in Cymru launched during Covid as a marketplace for independent Welsh businesses. The idea was simple. Wales has an extraordinary range of talented makers, producers and craftspeople. But finding them was difficult. They were scattered across Etsy shops and local markets and word of mouth recommendations. There was no single place where you could go and find Welsh made products across every category.
That was the gap I wanted to fill.
I had no idea whether it would work. Building a marketplace is genuinely hard. You need sellers and buyers simultaneously and each group is hesitant without the other already in place. The classic chicken and egg problem of platform businesses.
But something unexpected happened. The sellers came. Within months of launching, Made in Cymru had attracted hundreds of independent Welsh businesses — clothing makers and jewellers, breweries and distilleries, toy makers and candle makers and food producers and artists. By the time the marketplace reached its peak we had over 500 Welsh sellers signed up, all showcasing products made right here in Wales.
It became a community as much as a marketplace. Welsh businesses supporting each other, Welsh customers discovering makers they would never have found otherwise, a genuine expression of Welsh economic and creative identity in a single place.
I was proud of it. More proud than I had been of anything I had built before.
Why It Ended
Good things do not always last.
The honest truth about running a marketplace is that you are only as good as your sellers. And sellers, however talented and however committed, are running their own businesses with their own pressures. They come and go. They update their shops when business is good and let them go quiet when it is not. Managing all of that, at scale, across hundreds of sellers, is an enormous operational challenge.
The decision to close the marketplace was one of the hardest I have made in business. It felt like failure. I had built something from nothing during the strangest period most of us will ever live through. I had grown it into a genuine community. And then I had to walk away from it.
That stings. It still does.
But I was never walking away from Made in Cymru. The name, the brand, the idea behind it had become too much a part of me to let go. I have lived in Llandudno since I was seven years old. North Wales is home in the deepest sense. Made in Cymru was not just a business name. It was an expression of something genuine.
So I pivoted.
The New Direction
The marketplace is gone. What remains is something different and in some ways more focused.
Made in Cymru is now a Welsh identity clothing and gifts brand. Original designs rooted in Welsh history, culture and sport. T-shirts, hoodies and a growing range of Welsh gifts for people who feel Welsh, not just people who happen to have been born there.
The pivot came from a simple observation. Welsh pride is real and deep and widespread. Welsh people, whether they live in Llandudno or London or Los Angeles, carry their identity with them. They follow Welsh sport with an intensity that outsiders sometimes find hard to understand. They feel the wins and the losses in a way that is physical.
And yet the clothing available to express that pride has, for too long, been embarrassingly generic. Red dragons on cheap hoodies. Cwtch on a mug. The same tired designs repeated on every market stall and in every tourist shop from Cardiff to Conwy.
Welsh identity deserves better than that.
What We Make
Every design in the Made in Cymru range is rooted in something specific. Something that Welsh people know and feel.
The 1958 T-Shirt. The first time. The only time for 64 years. The squad of miners and steelworkers who represented Wales at the World Cup in Sweden and became legend. A tourist who has never followed Welsh football will see a number. A Welsh football fan who grew up hearing about Sweden 1958 will see everything.
The Red Wall Cymru T-Shirt. The Red Wall is not a new thing. The support has always been there. But Euro 2016 gave it a name and an identity and Made in Cymru gives it something to wear.
The Canton End T-Shirt. Before the Millennium Stadium. Before Cardiff City Stadium. There was Ninian Park and there was the Canton End. For everyone who was there, and for everyone who heard about it, this one means something specific.
The Class of 2016 T-Shirt. Nobody gave them a chance. Nobody except us. That summer in France changed Welsh football. This design is for everyone who watched every minute of it.
The Bale, Bellamy, Rush T-Shirt. Three names every Welsh football fan knows without needing a surname, a number or an explanation.
These are not decorations. They are references. In-jokes between people who share a history.
What We Are Building
Made in Cymru is a young brand in its current form. The clothing range is growing. New designs are being developed and added regularly. The gift range will expand. There are plans for new product categories and new collaborations that I will share when the time is right.
But the foundation is already clear. A brand built on genuine Welsh identity. On the history, the culture, the sport, the language, the landscape and the people that make Wales what it is.
Not tourist Wales. Not performative Wales. Real Wales.
The Wales that feels it in their chest when the anthem plays. That watches every qualifier regardless of the odds. That knows what hiraeth means without looking it up. That understands without explanation why 1958 matters and what the Red Wall represents and why the Canton End is worth wearing on a tee.
The ones that count.
A Personal Note
I am not a marketer writing about Welsh identity from a distance. I live it. Llandudno is home. North Wales is where I am from and where I choose to stay. The history and the culture and the sport that inform every Made in Cymru design are things I genuinely care about, not things I have researched for commercial purposes.
When I started the marketplace during Covid it was because I wanted to do something for Wales. To give Welsh makers a platform and Welsh buyers a destination. When I pivoted to clothing and gifts it was for the same reason. To give Welsh identity a home that takes it seriously.
Made in Cymru has been through one reinvention already. It started as a marketplace and became a brand. The thread running through both versions is the same.
Wales. Pride. The refusal to accept that Welsh identity deserves anything less than the best.
We are just getting started.
Wedi’i gynllunio yng Nghymru. Gyda balchder.
(Designed in Wales. With pride.)
Explore the full Welsh T-Shirts collection and the growing range of Welsh gifts — every piece designed in North Wales with a genuine connection to Wales at its heart.
