Shop Talk: Holos, Paddington’s new style powerhouse
Margie Moroney abandoned a lucrative career in investment banking to launch a luxury knitwear business. Now, with her new Paddington store about to open, she discusses the move from boardroom to boutique with Charlie Hale. Image by Elise Hassey.
It was almost two decades ago when Margie Moroney, standing in the boardroom of an investment bank, overheard the chairman refer to her position as “an experiment”. She was the only woman in an 11-strong department and one of just two women the department had ever hired. “Once you survive that, you get a bit of quiet confidence,” she says.
In that same boardroom, Moroney would stare out the window dreaming of the untapped potential of Australian superfine merino. It has taken 20 years for her dream to come to fruition, but now Holos Luxury Knitwear is anything but an experiment.
Moroney launched the brand four years ago with a range of superfine merino wraps and scarves. The line now includes jumpers, menswear and a new “Luxo T-shirt” in time for summer. Each piece — designed in Australia and made in Italy from the finest Australian wools — is an investment of sorts; the beautifully crafted embodiment of the sort of urban chic personified by Moroney herself.
The brand has built a loyal following among those who value both form and function, and Moroney now hopes to amp up its profile with the November 15 opening of Holos’s sparkling new boutique in Paddington’s leafy Underwood Street.
“I talked about knitwear for 20 years,” Moroney confesses, “Even in banking I’d be dreaming of perfect knitwear shapes and colours. I had this fear that I would get to the end of my life with a dream I was too apprehensive to do anything about, so I really had to get out of my own way, in a sense, and just get on with it.”
In the early days, Moroney admits she would pace the house at 2am.
“I had people asking me ‘What’s your growth rate?’, ’How many units are you going to sell by the end of the year?’ and ‘When are you opening in London?’. And then one day I thought, ‘Well who makes these rules anyway?’.”
“Once I untethered from traditional growth-path patterns, I found the confidence to grow the business as we put it, ‘one wrap at a time’.”
It’s a mantra that has resulted in a following of loyal customers who, as Moroney says, “literally write me love letters”.
Holos is something of an anomaly in the current era of fast fashion and wear-it-once clothing. Moroney deliberately keeps her collection compact. The introduction of a new women’s T-shirt — to coincide with the boutique launch — is the first new piece she has released in two years, which is fitting for a brand that promotes buying “fewer, better things that last”.
“There are so many ill-fitting garments in the world,” she says. “Knitwear often hangs off a collection as an afterthought, but we’ve taken a long time to develop some really modern shapes and translate them into this beautiful, well-performing fabric.”
120B Underwood Street, Paddington