Wild Thing - get ready to sparkle
When sisters Katie and Lauren Hobbs began selling t-shirts at festivals more than 15 years ago they could never have imagined the business it would turn into. Today Wild Thing is a thriving fashion outlet with more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 100,000 more on Facebook and TikTok.
The Wild Thing shop on Gloucester Road is a showcase for their work – crammed with clothes that shine and glitter for fashion followers, party goers and women who just like some added sparkle in their outfits.
Katie says: “We started out just selling t-shirts with printed slogans at Glastonbury, and also for hen and stag parties through eBay. Then covid came along and that all went. We’d always loved festival fashions and there didn’t seem to be anyone else selling them from one place. That’s where Wild Thing started."
Katie and Lauren ran the business from a series of small offices around Bristol before moving into the Gloucester Road shop just over a year ago.
“More than ninety per cent of our business is online, but we wanted a shop where people could just pop in and see the clothes for themselves”, says Katie.
Both women have strong local ties – Katie went to the former Lockleaze School while Lauren attended Monks Park, now the Orchard School. Lauren studied fashion design at Brighton. So what has it been liking working so closely together as sisters?
Lauren says: “Well, we had to learn how to navigate around each other for a while, but everything’s fine now.”
Katie says: “If we had just been friends, it probably wouldn’t have lasted, but because we’re sisters we just had to get on with it.”
The clothes in Wild Thing are strongly influenced by 70s fashion and the disco scene, designed in-house and mostly manufactured in India and China. Lauren says they take care to ensure they use factories that operate responsibly.
Their current most popular item is the £150 Fairy Garden Coat with distinctive rhinestone decoration.
“We’re just trying to make the world a sparklier place,” says Lauren.
