Longevity is a frequent focus for sustainable brands. Designing products that can be passed down and loved for generations to come is a key factor of being sustainable. When products last, they can become heirloom items passed down for generations. Meanwhile, natural fibers are sustainable, while also making them easier to recycle at a product’s end of life. One brand that is an exceptional example of sustainability being a successful strategy is Bonnie Mob. 2025 marks 20 years of this sustainable baby and kid’s brand being in business, showing how thoughtful production (and beautiful colors!) can lead to a brand’s longevity, as well as that of its products.

To learn more about Bonnie Mob, we spoke with the brand’s Founder and Owner, Tracey. Sharing a bit about the brand’s story, how their apple icon pays homage to an early success, and more, join us as we celebrate 20 years of Bonnie Mob by getting the brand’s story from the wonderful founder herself!

Tracey, Founder and Owner of Bonnie Mob

Having worked for over 10 years as a women’s knitwear designer at Sonia Rykiel in Paris, Tracey was at a point in her career where she was thinking about doing something new. When she became pregnant with her first child, she decided to make a change. Knowing that commuting back and forth from Paris to Brighton with a baby would be a challenge, Tracey launched her own knitwear brand, Bonnie Baby. Drawing inspiration from her Scottish roots, she chose the name “bonnie,” which means beautiful. Beginning the brand’s journey along with motherhood and having a new baby herself, the label was centered around baby-knits that were modern and colorful. Turning her expertise for creating new fabrics and textures to baby knitwear, Tracey filled a gap she found in the market when searching for clothing for her own child. 

Since the beginning, the brand’s DNA has been about pure childhood. Tracey wanted it to be reminiscent of her own childhood, bringing the values she grew up with to the modern market. Having grown up in the 70’s, clothes were made well and designed to be passed down to other people. She fondly remembers getting bags full of hand me downs from her mother’s friend’s children. She found that clothing was made to last, and wanted to bring that longevity and quality to her brand. In the kid’s market when her first child was born, she felt like no one made decent quality, natural clothing, especially not for knitwear. So, Bonnie Baby was designed to fix that! The brand’s DNA is centered around quality, beautiful fabrics, and yarns. The collections are made to be passed down.

One moment that helped kickstart Bonnie Baby in its early days was having Gwyneth Paltrow as an early adapter of the brand. Though this was back in 2005 before the prominence of social media, this resulted in a lot of great press. In order to get a piece from her just-launched collection to Gwyneth, Tracey tapped into her friend network. She had a friend in music PR who worked with Chris Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow’s then husband and father of their daughter, Apple. Tracey gave her friend a sweater from the Bonnie Baby collection, who gave it to Chris, who gave it to Gwyneth, who absolutely fell in love with it! She wrote a thank you note to Tracey asking for one of everything from the new collection, so Tracey called her manufacturer for a quick order and adopted the apple as the brand’s logo in honor of Gwyneth’s daughter.

When she started Bonnie Baby, Tracey was just thinking about being a new mom with a newborn. As her children and her customer’s kids started to grow up, demand grew for larger sizes. It was therefore an obvious choice to expand the collection up to age 7. With this expansion around their 10 year anniversary also came a rebrand. To avoid the word “baby” restricting them, Tracey decided to change the brand’s name to Bonnie Mob. She wanted to keep the word bonnie, but make it more about a gang of kids having fun. As they celebrate 20 years, Bonnie Mob is extending the collections up to age 9, expanding the mob once again!

As a self-proclaimed knit geek, Tracey is passionate and exceptionally knowledgable about knitwear. She loves how versatile it is, and wanted to continue working with this construction to create textiles. One starts with a simple piece of string and from there can create a unique fabric according to the stitch or the gauge of the machine. Tracey loves being able to start from scratch like this. She’s able to visualize the finished, beautiful knitted item from the beginning. As a real techie, she loves sitting with the technicians in the factory to brainstorm how to make the stitch work better. She’ll speak with them to figure out how to tighten it here or make it different there. Every piece of Bonnie Mob knitwear comes from a very thoughtful, technical background.

With her exceptional know-how, Tracey is able to make products that are exclusive to the brand. One of the best innovations she’s made recently is a space dyed knit. Tracey wanted to create a particular rainbow effect reminiscent of cardigans her grandma would knit for her in the 70’s. To achieve this, she worked directly with a factory to make the yarn. They’d never done this level of color before, so to show them where she wanted each color to land, Tracey marked a yarn with different colored sharpies. After several conversations, they created the space dyed rainbow knit Tracey had envisioned! This knit is exclusive to Bonnie Mob, and perfectly exemplifies Tracey’s expertise and the uniqueness it brings to each collection.

Bonnie Mob’s exclusive space dyed fabric

Natural fibers lead Tracey’s thinking and the material selection. If it’s not natural, then it has to be recycled. Tracey is very passionate about sustainability, and that helps guide her decision making process. Organic cottons, wool-cotton blends, and cashmere-cotton mixes make up their collections. She also uses recycled polyester for their swimwear. Everything has a thoughtful point of construction, with Tracey carefully considering how materials will last and wear. If a fabric looks like it may be too fragile for kidswear, she won’t use it.

A natural evolution for the brand was to add jersey products to complement their knitwear. Jersey offers a different price point and durability, while keeping the fabrics soft and stretchy. Though she loves it, Tracey knows knitwear isn’t perfect for everything! For garments like trousers or layettes that need to be durable in a different way, she incorporates organic jerseywear into the collections.

When selecting materials and finishings, as for any kidswear brand, regulations are a factor as well. Because they have points of sale in South Korea, who has some of the strictest regulations in the world, Bonnie Mob follows these standards for each item. Though it’s a costly step of production, it’s worthwhile to fully test and carefully source every aspect of their products. Given these strict regulations and Tracey’s own passion for sustainability, each Bonnie Mob collection can be trusted for its ethical production. From the zippers to the fibers, everything is safe for the planet and the little ones that will wear them.

Bonnie Mob won the 2024 Marie Claire UK Sustainability Award

Each Bonnie Mob collection starts with color. With her background at Sonia Rykiel and her naturally colorful hand, Tracey has always started there. She starts by creating a color palette, leaning more towards juicy colors that are joyful and fun. It’s always a rainbow, with some brights often mixed with a few pastels. From the colors, Tracey decides on a theme to center the collection around. Once she has that idea, she begins drawing different motifs that fit that theme.

For Spring-Summer 2025, the collection is based on the grand tour British aristocrats would take in the Victorian era. To adapt this concept to a childrenswear collection, Tracey imagined the grand tour from a modern child’s perspective. Rather than visiting marble statues and monuments, the collection takes us on a tour of ice cream shops in European capitals. We send nostalgic post cards home, and learn how to say “hello” in several different languages. We can watch sailboats from the shore of new seas as we play in the sunny sand. The motifs celebrate what is important to children and what would interest them on this grand tour.

Bonnie Mob’s SS25 Collection

Recently, Bonnie Mob has also launched an Icons collection. This stock service range captures the essence of Bonnie Mob in a small layette and knitwear range. It offers buyers who don’t want too much seasonality or that are specialized in gifting an option outside of their seasonal collections. Tracey says this is more like what she did at the brand’s inception. They had then shifted into seasonality according to the demands of the market. Adapting once again with the Icons collection, Tracey is offering a bit of both. She’ll continue to create new collections each season while maintaining this stock range. One benefit is this allows buyers to test out Bonnie Mob in their store with these items that are the epitome of the brand. It’s also intended to cater to stores focused on gifting who want to maintain a consistent offer.

She believes the Icons collection will also fill a gap for transitional pieces that can work in any season. With the effects of climate change being felt around the world, she’s noted that there is less variation between seasons. In the UK, she’s seeing milder winters and summers, meaning the same products can work for more of the year than they used to.

Bonnie Mob has been a staple at Playtime for as long as it’s been around! Following a brief break, Bonnie Mob’s beautiful collections have returned to the aisles of both Playtime Paris and Playtime & Kid’s Hub New York for several seasons now. Tracey loves being able to meet with the brand’s customers in person at the shows, and to develop relationships with new ones. Bonnie Mob is also on the partner B2B platform of Playtime, OrderWizz. She finds it the perfect complement to her business at the trade shows, seeing it almost as a little extra show available year round. Tracey uses OrderWizz mainly to work with customers that didn’t have a chance to place orders at the physical events.

Bonnie Mob’s booth at Playtime Paris, Summer 2024

Having been in business for 20 years now, Tracey has seen the kid’s market evolve. When she started with Bonnie Baby, there were about six other kid’s brands in the United Kingdom. Since then, she’s noticed a huge explosion of brands. She finds this increase positive in a lot of ways, but worries about how it is happening. Some of these are, sadly, fast fashion labels that are having detrimental effects on the environment and the children that wear them. Tracey really believes in the importance of natural fabrics and their health benefits for both people and the planet. Given that she works so hard to make a minimal impact on the environment and follow strict guidelines to ensure the safety of her collections, it’s frustrating to see some brands not care and succeed. Still, she remains optimistic. We’re seeing sustainability become more of a factor in consumer’s purchasing decisions.

Tracey is also curious to see how social media will evolve. In the UK, she’s hearing a lot of kickback as people are becoming fed up and overwhelmed by social media.

For brands just starting out, the biggest advice she’d offer is to stick to your core beliefs. Times are quite uncertain around the world right now, so staying true to your instincts is essential. Over the years, she’s taken some suggestions and ignored others, and what she’s found is that it’s essential to trust your own instincts. She recommends being open to feedback, but also knowing how to translate it to align with what your brand stands for. 

Bonnie Mob’s SS25 collection

Being able to adapt and evolve is one way Bonnie Mob has been able to stay in business for 20 years. From pivoting to include a children’s range and rebranding to constantly developing innovative designs, Bonnie Mob is a brand that has been able to be flexible while staying true to its core values of sustainability, durability, and beauty.

Thank you so much to Tracey for sharing the story so far of Bonnie Mob! As they celebrate 20 years, Tracey is looking back with pride on achievements past and present. From the adoption of the brand by Gwyneth Paltrow in its early days to winning the Marie Claire UK Sustainability Award last year, there’s a lot to be proud of. We can’t wait to see what the next 20 years bring!

Buyers can pre-order Bonnie Mob’s Autumn-Winter 25-26 collection, “Club Magique,” until March 31 on OrderWizz. Their Icons collection is available in stock, as well as their Spring-Summer 2025 collection, “Wish You Were Here,” that brings to life a child’s version of a European grand tour.

All images from Bonnie Mob