LONDON — Vollebak is shooting for the moon.

The London-based label, headquartered in Granary Square, King’s Cross, is courting big thinkers whose ideas may alter the course of human history, with products made for among the most extreme scenarios depicted in H. G. Wells novels or Christopher Nolan movies.

Meaning “all out” or “go for it” within the old Flemish dialect, Vollebak was founded by brothers Nick and Steve Tidball, who each come from promoting backgrounds.

Since 2016, Vollebak has released a slew of big-idea products, resembling a thermal camouflage jacket, one other jacket entirely constructed from copper and a hoodie with a vomit pocket meant for space travel.

It also produces a series of more wearable lines. The Apocalypse range, for instance, is touted to “withstand black lava, flash fires, chemical erosion and zombies.” The actual products are made using fireproof materials and are available with 23 pockets on the inner lining. Meanwhile the Titan range is made for “cryogenically cold weather” and offers puffers product of the sunshine, strong, temperature-resistant parachute fabric that NASA utilized in the Mars landing of the Perseverance Rover.

Their vision, which sometimes was frowned upon by the style world for being too detached from reality, eventually found resonance in Silicon Valley.

The brand closed a $10 million funding round in November 2021 led by enterprise capital firm Venrex, with participation from Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, Headspace’s chief financial officer Sean Brecker, Rapha cofounder Simon Mottram and a number of other undisclosed private investors.

The brand can also be one in all the recipients of Venrex BFC Fashion I, a recent fund the British Fashion Council founded with Venrex last yr.

In an interview with WWD, Steve Tidball said the raging Californian wildfire that made global headlines in 2021 played a key role in helping investors realized that Vollebak’s vision will not be so distant. (The recent wildfires in Canada that sent a thick cloud of smoke over much of the country and the northeastern U.S. this past week may scarily function much more evidence.)

“Considered one of our investors emailed me in the midst of the lockdown when L.A. was on fire and nobody was allowed to depart the home,” he said: “I feel the frontiers are coming to us now. Should you’d desired to face really extreme stuff 50 years ago, you’d either must go scale a mountain, go to war or attempt to go to the underside of the ocean. But within the last five years loads of that has come to what we expect as protected and normal places.”

Tidball argued that the brand will not be fascinated by sell their clothes to people, but as an alternative how the brand new reality or future concerns make them reframe the best way they make purchase decisions.

“From our experience and the purchasers we chat with, people have rethought how they give thought to their very own levels of private protection. If clothing is one element of answering that problem you then put it more right into a problem-solution bucket than what type of a color I would like to wear today,” he added.

The most recent offering from the brand, an 11-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia, inbuilt partnership with famed architect Bjarke Ingels, looks to increase the protection solution beyond apparel to habitation.

Billed as “a robust vision of how we would live to tell the tale Earth in a self-sustaining way,” the island includes a 6,426-square-foot Earth House, consisting of nine interconnected buildings, and a standalone 947-square-foot Wood House on the island’s eastern shoreline.

The island achieves full energy self-sufficiency through a mix of geothermal energy, offshore wind and solar energy, with the energy stored in Tesla power partitions.

“Ingels is a genius. He’s constructing the moon base. He’s working so much with Elon Musk and he has done the Google London office. Because his worldview may be very utopian, he may be very wanted, particularly in Silicon Valley, where many individuals want to vary the world for the higher. He has this working idea called ‘hedonistic sustainability,’ in other words, sustainability doesn’t must be boring and dry,” Tidball said.

The brand worked on choosing hero materials which can be utilized in the project, and Nick Tidball, who was an architect, worked hand in hand with Ingels’ practice BIG to shine the concept of the project, which took three years to finish.

“We also asked them if there’s something that they secretly wanted. In order that they’ve got this plan of this carbon-neutral human civilization, and so they needed a proof of concept. So we provided them with a blank canvas to try this,” Tidball said.

Vollebak Island will likely be auctioned via Sotheby’s Concierge Auctions on June 14 at Sotheby’s Recent York with an estimated price between $5 million and $10 million.

Tidball anticipates that the project will likely be popular amongst architectural collectors, or people “who wish to own a small piece of the longer term.”

As for why Nova Scotia was picked for the project, Tidball said one in all their investors strongly really useful it.

“He said the easiest way of describing the islands on Nova Scotia is you’ll be eating your breakfast on a beach and a squirrel will start attempting to steal it after which a seal will are available to play with the squirrel. I feel that’s the proper place to construct something that seems completely in harmony. Let’s say you are trying to try this in the midst of Recent York — you’d make loads of noise but it surely would look really misplaced,” he added.

In the long term, Tidball said he hopes Vollebak can bring a quiet revolution to the style industry, identical to famed Copenhagen restaurant Noma did with the culinary world. Within the meantime, the brand is planning for a number of disruptive moments like Vollebak Island to “crash worlds and make people sit up.”

“It is going to be very easy to follow the pack and make 1,000,000 T-shirts and do some crazy marketing campaigns to sell those T-shirts,” he said: “But that’s not what we’re serious about. We wish to create a line within the sand, where clothing may be fundamentally different from after we’ve existed and before we existed.”