Based in the foothills of the Scottish Highlands, husband and wife team Caroline Inchyra has been creating timeless fabrics and accessories since 2012. They’ve been one of our brand partners since our early days in 2020, supplying their surplus textiles and remnants for design lovers like you. Since then, they’ve also become part of our Haines Curates collective, offering sustainably made, printed-to-order textiles
Read our conversation with Founder and designer Caroline to get to know them better.
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Caroline, you founded Inchyra over 10 years ago. What has been your greatest learning, and what advice would you give to someone who is just starting out in the interiors industry?
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The industry has changed beyond all recognition in the last 10 years, and the main reason for this is the advent of digital textile printing. Digital has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for printed fabrics, and the result of that is that there are many more people entering the market. It is very crowded these days, and I think that if I had had any idea of the enormity of the competition, I might not have dared start Inchyra. There’s a lot to be said for blissful ignorance!
New businesses in print need to have either money or time behind them. My advice would be that, like any creative endeavour, it’s best to treat it as a wonderful hobby initially and allow it to prove itself before you throw everything behind it. I ran Inchyra alongside another business and allowed it to grow organically, but it was far from easy, and there were many times over the years when we nearly pulled the plug.
On the plus side, while digital means there is more competition, it also means that it is much easier to get the word out about your brand, so you do need to master social media. I am slightly ashamed to say that this is something I could be doing much more effectively, but I am using my age as an excuse!
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Inchyra only works with pure natural fabrics and over the last few years has moved exclusively to digital printing. What was the motivation behind this?
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My aim from the beginning was to produce new linens that looked and handled like old. To me, there is nothing more wonderful than old linen, where the dye has been pushed down into the weave and the cloth has softened through time and use.
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We put the linens through our specialised finishing process to achieve the softness we have become known for, and a linen mix fabric simply wouldn’t take the finish. Added to this, I would hate the idea that any of our linens would ever sit in landfill – I remember seeing a documentary about landfill near Basingstoke where they were pulling out clothes that had gone into the site in the 1980s, and they were virtually unchanged. Pure fabrics will biodegrade completely.
We moved to digital printing for several reasons. The investment in screen printing is so huge that, for a small company, it becomes prohibitively expensive to make complicated designs, as each screen costs so much. Add to that the fact that the sheer size of the operation means that minimum runs are 200 metres per colourway, and you soon get to a point where you don’t have the warehousing space or the money to invest in new designs.
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Digital is an all-around winner – a much smaller operational footprint for the printer, which saves in costs and energy and water usage, so is much better for the environment. Plus, we can print to order for every customer, which means that our warehousing requirements are tiny, saving on the footprint, costs and energy usage at our end, and there is very little fabric waste as everything is printed for a purpose.
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Your home is Inchyra House on the Inchyra Estate near Perth in Scotland. Has its location or character influenced your design work?
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We moved to Scotland from London in 2003, and, in some respects, the house has influenced everything. I would not have met Angus Nicholl, who ran the last major linen mill in Scotland, which set me off on my linen mission. I also think Scotland very much influences my colour palette – the light is so soft and the colours are so pure and natural.
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A few years ago, I thought that I ought to be more professional in colouring designs and, rather than choosing colours by eye, I should refer to Pantone colours. I produced two designs with Pantone references and have never liked them – I always felt they were far too strong and jarred against the rest of the collection – so much so that we have just recoloured the designs and retired the offending Pantones!
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What is your favourite part of the design process or the area you find most rewarding?
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That one is easy: it’s when the strike-offs arrive from the printers. These are the test prints that we do to see how a design works as a fabric or wallpaper. It’s like Christmas every time! Some designs work straight off the bat, and we barely have to touch them after the first strike-off; others are the absolute opposite. For instance, with the new Briar collection, Briar itself was a doddle - and we actually had so many colourways that we loved it was hard to edit it down to even the seven colourways that we launched with. Clover, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different, and the difficulties with getting it right actually led to the whole collection being released a season later than planned!
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We are so proud to have Inchyra as one of our brand partners. Discover our full collection of their textiles and home accessories here >
Want more? Read our Q&A with Volga Linen, one of our more recent additions to Haines.
