I first spoke to Calum Gregory back in September, during the weekend fashion brand Gander brought their AW25 collection to 228 Brick Lane, east London. The unit had a distinctly rugged character : brick walls and timber frames complemented by clothing suspended from thick, sculptural branches.
In the middle of it all was Calum, 28 – steady and warm. His Mancunian accent carried above the music, unhurried, as if part of the environment. There’s no sense of selling with him, just someone who genuinely enjoys watching people pick up the pieces he has made. That honesty makes sense when you hear how Gander began – not as a brand, but as a personal project. “Thing is, I was never doing this to start a clothing brand or for people to buy it, sounds mad now to say that,” he told me. “I was looking for fulfillment in life in the form of a creative project. So the fact that people actually like and buy the product, is still a mad surprise.”
At the centre of that origin story sits the Peveril Jacket, named after the Peveril of the Peak — the green-tiled Manchester pub Calum grew up passing on his way through town. The design traces back to old fishing wading jackets. “The Peveril Jacket is where this all began: a reference to the old style fishing wading jackets, most notably the Patagonia SST Jacket that I think 90% of the world’s population has referenced,” he said, laughing. For AW25, the Peveril split into two new forms: one padded and closer to a flight jacket, the other cut from heavier Australian wool. Throughout the evening, people kept drifting back to it, lifting it from the branch it hung on, studying its weight and shape in the mirror.
Speaking with Calum, the timeline of Gander’s growth still sounds surreal – even to him. “Two weeks after launching the brand I got approached to showcase at Paris Fashion Week in January and the following September, which would be Gander’s first birthday, we partnered with one of the leading stores in Tokyo and hosted a pop-up with them,” he explained.
That store was 1LDK in Nakameguro, Tokyo — a name he still says with a mix of disbelief and pride. “Wow, yeah – that was a true pinch me moment, and I remind myself, all of that happened in just one year.” None of this was predetermined. No business strategy. No blueprint. Just instinct, momentum, and a project that kept taking on life forms of its own. Calum admitted he had “big imposter syndrome,” and still does; working with a store like 1LDK felt surreal then, and in some ways, still does now.
Local references run deeper than people often realise. “The brand name ‘Gander’ is what we say up here over in the North when we’re looking for something or going for a walk about,” he explained. “The name of the products are taken from places of my childhood or hotspots in Manchester I hang around – mainly pubs!” It’s subtle, but once you see it, it’s there:Stevenson Square, Deansgate, Castle Pub, the Pennines.
If Gander hadn’t existed, Calum tells me he’d still be on a construction site in Bolton, north Manchester. “Not fulfilled in life,” he said simply. “That’s great, if you enjoy it, but no, that was never for me. Christ, I hope all this works out.” He laughed, but there was truth under it — “life was quite mundane before Gander, essentially just working to get to the weekend.”
He never studied fashion, never planned any of this. Everything he knows is self-taught, learned on the job, driven by curiosity rather than credentials. And standing in that Brick Lane crowd back in September, watching people handle the clothes with real warmth and interest, it was obvious the brand already meant something to people – actual people, not hypothetical customers on a spreadsheet.
That, perhaps more than anything, is what Gander’s community truly is. “It’s my own group of friends and family who I design for,” he told me. “It’s the people who I choose to work with, the freelancers and businesses I surround myself with, the mates who shape who I am- I want a personal relationship with them. The idea of all working towards a common goal.” The crowd that night felt like an extension of that circle: locals, followers, loyal customers and passers-by who stepped in out of curiosity and somehow stayed.
Gander has become something rare: a label carried by instinct and kept alive by the people who recognise themselves in it. It may have started by accident, but what it’s becoming is anything but.