For headwear brand Will & Bear, Australia is their office and the world their oyster

Will & Bear take their headwear on the road and around the world.

Lauren Williams and Alex Knorr travel around Australia in a Kombi selling hats and beanies. Picture: Roy Vandervegt

A love of adventure, the environment and fights over a hat were the seeds that sprouted Will & Bear.

The hat company’s founders Lauren Williams and Alexander Knorr were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, on holiday in Tasmania, when they decided that Knorr needed a hat.

“We both thought it was so strange: neither of us knew a brand we felt comfortable buying,” Williams says.

“A $300 Akubra feels a bit intimidating,” adds Knorr.

Once they found one suitable, “we kept fighting over the hat”, says Williams. They liked that it had a sort of gender neutrality, and realised “so many (headwear) brands are either male or female — we didn’t see people doing well with unisex”.

Sensing an opportunity, the couple developed the idea for Will & Bear (named after their own nicknames) and took advantage of Knorr’s photographic talents (he worked in product design and later graphic design and branding) and the burgeoning Instagram platform for creatives and retailers.

“We had the idea of going on an adventure with a hat,” says Williams. “Just photos of hats and people exploring.”

After a year and a half of development, the couple launched the brand in 2015, using their house deposit as a kickstarter.

“Much to our mums’ disgust,” adds Knorr.

“We decided it was a better investment than buying a house — and it was,” says Williams, a former mortgage broker.

The travel-loving couple took that one step further, however. While they based themselves in Byron Bay for a time, they didn’t like the permanency of their set-up.

Instead, they hit the road once more to explore Australia in a Kombi van that “diehard” Kombi fan Knorr had spent four months restoring. (That first van suffered a “stuffed gearbox” near a cattle station in outback South Australia and they’re now on their second, named Marty.)

The van continues to serve as home and office, with the great Australian landscape as their backdrop.

Williams says they work with about 10 contractors on different aspects of the business, all connected digitally, “so they can work from anywhere in the world”.

Critical to the pair, both in their early 30s, was the idea of giving back to the environment, and using sustainable materials in production.

The main category is wool hats, using Australian merino, whether in felted or knitted styles, as well as seagrass, straw and some cotton.

Manufacturing takes place mostly in Inner Mongolia and some elsewhere in China, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. They have visited all the suppliers to make sure conditions are acceptable.

Further to their environmental goals, for every hat sold, 10 trees are planted in west Africa though a partnership with Trees.org.

“We were influenced heavily by a lot of businesses that to us are doing the right thing,” says Knorr, citing Who Gives A Crap toilet paper and Bellroy wallets, with which Knorr once worked.

“We always wanted to give back. In terms of revenue, we give about 2 per cent of revenue each year, which last year was about 20 per cent of profit. It ends up being a sizeable chunk of what we’re making, but we factored it in so early we’re seeing the results of it.”

The adventurers headed to Senegal to visit the project they are involved with.

“It gives us a deeper connection with the people doing the project, the farmers, and we can see it’s really helping them a lot.

“The best thing is the education about food security, poverty alleviation, as well as planting trees for the environment. It has so many benefits.”

Closer to home, the bushfire crisis currently playing out in Australia was another call to action; the brand raised and donated $22,909 from sales in 24 hours for rural fire services.

Australia still makes up 90 per cent of Will & Bear’s market, and while they also promote their wares in New Zealand. They ship anywhere and even get “strange orders from Mozambique”, says Knorr. And with new markets come new adventures.

Next year the couple plans to visit the US and even open a warehouse there.

“We have a lot of organic traffic from there,” says Knorr. “But it’s hard for American customers to get our product.”

True to brand, Williams adds: “Then we’ll get a van there and do a road trip.”