Why We Design Everything Ourselves

At Sleepy Peach, we’ve been asked the same question more times than we can count: “Who designs your stuff?”

The short answer? We do. All of it.

The long answer? It’s a little more complicated (but way more interesting). And it gets to the heart of what makes Sleepy Peach different from 99% of the brands out there.

If you’ve ever wondered why our collections feel so specific, or why you’ve never seen a cardigan like ours before, or why our prints always seem to come out of left field (clowns? bugs? the 1901 World's Fair??), it’s because we’re not outsourcing this. We’re not recycling trends. We’re not paying someone on Fiverr to make graphics that feel "on brand."

We ARE the brand. And we design or curate everything ourselves, down to the last stitch.

Let us explain why that matters for you and for us.

We Don’t Follow Trends. We create them.

Most fashion brands are built like this:
Step 1. Hire a designer.
Step 2. Research “trending aesthetics” for the next season.
Step 3. Adapt those trends into clothes that feel “safe” enough to mass-produce.
Step 4. Release. Repeat.

That’s not how we operate.

Sleepy Peach doesn’t start with the trend report. We start with the idea first. 

Maybe it’s a weird one. “What if a shirt looked like a vintage Coney Island postcard?”
Maybe it's nostalgic. “Remember when we had that medieval playset?”
Sometimes it's poetic. “What if a cardigan felt like the last day of summer?”

We follow that idea until it becomes something real. And because we don’t design for what’s trending, our stuff doesn’t expire after one season. It’s not built to match an algorithm. It’s built to match a feeling.

So when you wear a Sleepy Peach piece, you’re not chasing a trend. You’re wearing a story.

Outsourcing Kills Originality

We get it. Most brands outsource because it’s faster and easier. You hire a freelance designer, toss them a vague moodboard, and hope what comes back is usable. And it often is. But here’s the problem:

If 10 different brands are all hiring the same 10 freelance designers, everything starts to look the same.

That’s why you’ll see 17 different brands on your feed with the same puff-print font. Or the same recycled “bootleg” style. Or the same fake-vintage designs that look like they were made by AI (because sometimes they were).

We don’t want Sleepy Peach to blend in.

We don’t want our cardigans mistaken for anyone else’s.
We don’t want to ride someone else’s aesthetic wave.
We want to make something you haven’t seen before.

That’s the gift of designing in-house: originality. Total creative control. Total weirdness, if we want it. No filter. No gatekeeper.

And no “design by committee” either.

Every Piece Tells our Story

Here’s something most people don’t think about: when you wear a shirt, you’re telling a story. Not just about what you like, but about who made it, and why.

If a brand didn’t design their clothes themselves, what exactly ARE you supporting?

When you wear a Sleepy Peach piece, you’re supporting a real small team of artists, specifically, us. We sketch. We edit. We choose pantones like we’re casting a movie. We punch the air when a cardigan sample turns out perfect. We celebrate when someone DMs us a photo of themselves wearing a cardigan to a job interview.

And when we say “we design everything,” we mean everything.

Not just the graphics. We mean the fit. The fabric. The pockets. The spacing between buttons.  All of it is intentional. All of it is personal. Details matter.

You can’t get that with outsourcing. You can't fake that level of care.

We’re Allowed to Be Emotional About Clothes

Fashion used to be art. It used to be about self-expression. Lately it feels more like content.

You know the kind: shirts made to go viral on TikTok. AI-generated designs cranked out by people who don’t even know how cotton feels. Brands with no voice and no heart, just vibes.

We don’t want to be part of that.

We want to make the kind of clothes that give you butterflies. That feel like finding a great thrift piece, except it’s in your size and doesn’t smell like cigarettes. That make strangers ask “where did you get that?”

To do that, we have to be involved. We have to get emotional.

When you see something like our “Snails Just Wanna Have Fun" or “Greek Gods” Sweaters it’s not random. It’s not trend-chasing. It’s us, trying to bottle up a little feeling and give it to you to wear.

The Fit Matters (and So Does the Feeling)

We design our garments from scratch. Not on a template. Not by tweaking existing blanks.

This matters because fit is emotional.

The way a shirt hangs on your shoulders. The way a cardigan falls when unbuttoned. The softness of the knit. The weight of the fabric when you’re walking through a grocery store on a Sunday afternoon.

We don’t think clothes should just “fit” technically. They should feel right. And that only happens when we obsess over the details ourselves.

We’re not just saying “Oh, this looks good.” We’re saying “How do we want people to feel when they wear this?” And then designing backwards from that feeling and emotion.

We Don’t Need Permission

Designing in-house gives us the freedom to follow our gut. We don’t need a creative director to greenlight a collection. We don’t have to get investor approval to make a denim jacket covered in cats.

If we like it and we think you'll like it we make it. That’s it.

No middlemen. No pitch decks. Just weird joy.

Our Aesthetic Comes From our Interests

If you’ve ever looked at a Sleepy Peach piece and gone, “Wait… what is this inspired by?”, congratulations! You’ve seen the blueprint.

We pull from Old Hollywood postcards, early 2000s bootlegs, brutalist architecture, 1950s diners, 1990s anime, medieval etchings, and whatever bizarre thing we’re fixating on that week.

No one else would combine all those influences. But we do. Because it’s us.

And because we design everything ourselves, we can blend those references however we want. We can stitch a little Matt Groening into a streetwear silhouette. We can add existential horror to a tote bag. 

It’s not easy. But it’s real. And it’s ours.

We’re Not Trying to Be the Biggest

Big brands care about scale. They want to make the same shirt a hundred thousand times. They want it to look “good enough” to not offend anyone, “cool enough” to get some likes, and cheap enough to make a killing.

That’s not our goal.

We’d rather make 100 perfect cardigans that feel like collector’s items. We’d rather our customers say “this is my favorite thing in my closet” than “I got it on sale.” We’d rather be the weird little brand you obsess over than the big one you forget two weeks later.

We’re not designing for clicks. We’re designing for our audience.

That’s what happens when you keep your design team in-house.

It’s a Labor of Love (Emphasis on Both Words)

Running a clothing brand independently is a lot of work.

Doing everything ourselves means late nights. Weird color proofs. Last-minute changes because something feels off. Hours spent tweaking a neckline or debating if the design looks too sad.

But it also means that every piece we release has love in it. And yes, we know that sounds cheesy. But it’s true.

There’s a reason people get attached to our clothes. It’s because we're attached to them first.

When You Buy from Us, You’re Buying From Us...Not a Design Pipeline

In a world where most brands are just middlemen for production, Sleepy Peach is something different.

We’re not a storefront for someone else’s ideas. We’re not outsourcing our creativity. We’re putting ourselves on the line every time we launch something new.

Every order supports a design or concept that didn’t exist before we dreamed it up. Every time you wear a Sleepy Peach piece, you’re repping something real.

Not a trend. Not a knockoff. Not a reskin.

Just us.

TL;DR:

We design everything ourselves because that’s the only way we know how to do it right. It’s the difference between clothing that looks good and clothing that feels good. Clothing that blends in and clothing that starts a conversation.

It’s more work. It’s less scalable. But it’s a lot more meaningful.

And judging by the response we get from you all every drop, it’s worth it.

Thanks for being part of this little experiment in staying weird.