What If We Slowed Down, Too?

We’ve built Yonder around the beauty of slow, thoughtful making—but recently realised we haven’t been living by that same pace. A gentle reflection on fast days, slow craft, and trying to bring the two back into balance.

How Weekend Rituals Inspired Our New Collection Reading What If We Slowed Down, Too? 5 minutes

By sophia leppardMar 31, 20250 comments

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Living the Way We Make

Lately, we’ve been thinking about the pace of things.

We built Yonder around the idea that slowness isn’t just beautiful — it’s essential. The way we create is slow by nature: rooted in care, intention, and the time it takes to do things properly. Our collections are made using traditional methods, by people who know that craft and patience go hand in hand.

But over the past few months—between launching a new collection, moving studios, expanding our team and juggling the chaos of it all—we realised something quietly uncomfortable.

We’d stayed true to slowness in the way we make, but we weren’t living by that same rhythm ourselves.

To-do lists kept growing. Days felt like a race. We found ourselves rushing through tasks, squeezing more into our hours, and somehow ending every day still feeling behind. It’s a strange irony—that even when we believe in slowing down with all our hearts, the pull of busyness is strong. Especially in a world that rewards constant doing.

Every week, it seems like there’s a new tool or app designed to help us do more—automate this, streamline that, post faster, reply quicker. And yet, we don’t find ourselves finishing the day early with a quiet moment to stretch and reflect. Instead, our expectations quietly shift. The list gets longer. The pace picks up. And that sense of breathing space — the one we’re supposedly creating—just drifts a little further out of reach.

So, this is a small pause. A moment to check in and ask ourselves: what would it look like to live the way we make?

Behind the Pieces: The Beauty of Slowness

At the heart of Yonder are the people and processes that bring our ideas to life—and each one is steeped in slowness.

Our organic cotton pyjamas are hand-printed in Jaipur using the traditional technique of block printing. Every motif is stamped by hand with carved wooden blocks—a slow, meditative rhythm passed down through generations. The colours are built up layer by layer using natural dyes, giving each piece its own depth and softness. (We’ll be sharing more of this process on our journal soon—because it’s truly something to see.)

Our house shoes are made in a tiny workshop by three brothers—Aziz, Morit and Hafid—who do everything by hand. From babies' first shoes to soft suede slippers for grown-ups, every pair is cut, stitched, and shaped with patience. When orders pile up or shops sell out, we sometimes feel the urge to speed up production. But the brothers are gentle and firm in their reminder: the best things take time. They simply won’t be rushed (believe us—in moments of stock flow panic we've tried) —and honestly, they’re right. They help keep us grounded when we’re spiralling into “just one more thing” mode back at the studio.

It’s easy to forget, in the noise of London, how much care is folded into each piece. But stepping back—even just to write this post—helps us remember why we do things the way we do.

A Work in Progress

We’re not here with a list of answers. Just a quiet admission that we’ve been swept up in the pace of things, and a gentle commitment to do better. To take our own advice. To leave a little more space between the tasks. To let the things we make inspire how we move through the day, not just what we wear.

If you’ve been feeling this too—the quiet weight of always rushing—we hope this is a reminder that you’re not alone.

And maybe it’s also permission to slow down a little. To choose softness. To let time be something you take, not just something that runs away from you.

We’ll be revisiting this conversation again, we’re sure of it. But for now, we’re simply trying to live the way we make.