Grazed Knees On Route - A Founders Journey

I was seventeen when I signed up for the Haute Route. I am not sure I grasped the magnitude of the undertaking then, despite having grown up as the daughter of a mountaineer and having spent most of my childhood summers in the Alps. After months of training and full of optimism, I embarked on a high-altitude journey from Mont Blanc in France to the Matterhorn in Switzerland — a line drawn across the Alps in peaks, passes, and glaciers. It was a lesson in endurance that would later prove invaluable in a very different kind of journey.

By the end of the first day, the romance of the idea had given way to the harsh reality of the expedition. Each morning began in darkness with another alpine start. Steep climbs burned my legs, rocky descents tested me, and glacier crossings by head torch with crampons and ice axe required full concentration. With each passing day, the friction of long hours across rough terrain took its toll on my feet, my lungs strained, and the thin mountain air precipitated frequent headaches and a constant internal refrain that questioned my resolve. Evenings offered only brief shelter: rustic huts, the ritual peeling back of socks to assess blister damage, and the quiet camaraderie of fellow mountaineers sharing stories with the soft resignation of the exhausted.Yet amid the hardship were moments of pure pleasure. Sunrises cast a warm glow over the high Alps and settled on the most ambitious mountaineers, who would set out earlier than the rest of us, quietly descending to the foot of the glacier in an attempt to be first across. Clear alpine streams and the gentle chime of cowbells drifted across the slopes like a soft metronome, punctuated by murmured words of encouragement. These fragments of beauty sustained me in ways I only understood later.

The Haute Route stayed with me long after the blisters healed — a quiet lesson in ambition, resilience, and the patience required to reach any meaningful summit.

Some years later, excited by the creative potential in making something useful from a previously discarded natural resource, I found myself embarking on a different kind of journey. Equipped with a better understanding of the route to success — typically long and seldom linear — my husband and I set out to create RUSKIN.

Even with a clear vision, we encountered resistance from the outset. More than one mill thought the idea of producing a high-performance, premium fabric using wool from the rare Herdwick sheep was absurd. When we finally secured a mill willing to make our yarn, an entire cascade of new challenges followed in design and production.

You can’t imagine the disappointment we experienced, having waited patiently for just over a year to see our custom tweed successfully through production, only to unbox the first samples and find them to be nothing of what we had anticipated. While the samples could have been described as robust, the unforgiving hardware, difficult-to-handle secondary materials, and absence of subtle, refined details completely lacked the finesse. Nothing about them resonated with the design language we were striving for.

The disappointment echoed the lessons of the Haute Route: when the conditions turn against you, you don’t turn back — you adjust, put your head down, and keep going.

Just as on the Haute Route, where perseverance revealed the climbers and guides you could trust, the setbacks revealed the people who would ultimately keep us moving forward: our artisans with decades of mastery, an intuitive understanding of material, and an unwavering belief in our thoughtful design. Their craft is slow, meticulous, and deeply felt — a rhythm that is the quiet heartbeat of RUSKIN. They remind us that true value lies not in shortcuts, but in respecting the route, the process, and the pride of making something meaningful with one’s hands.Our low-volume, slow-tempo journey has been guided by creativity and the rhythm of artisanal production — the result of thought, care, and sheer hard work. This approach has become so much part of the way we operate that we cannot imagine the way we design and create existing in any other way. It is crucial to keeping our vision intact and our story alive.

In both life and business, it is the journey, and the people who join us along the way, that shape and define our success. Embracing the journey, with all its bumps and grinds, leads to the most interesting and rewarding destinations. Despite the grazed knees along the way, when I look back, I am glad we chose this route.