Kathleen Redmond was born in West Hampstead, London, in a part of town she says “sounds all swanky and posh now” but wasn’t quite that when she was growing up. Her parents were both Irish, having moved to England in the 1970s and, as she puts it, accidentally ended up staying. Her father was born in Athlone, but after his mother died when he was seven he was raised in Galway. Her mother grew up in Athlone.

As a child, Kathleen spent summers in Ireland visiting family, and her favourite place by far was her aunt Bernadette’s, near Castlerea. There were no cars, and she remembers going out with a bucket to collect the reflective cat’s eyes off the road, unaware at the time that this was probably not allowed.

A job interview that turned into a life

Kathleen first came to Boyle in 2005 for a job interview. Before she left, she asked her aunt to drive her around the town so she could take a proper look. She fell for it immediately: the clock in the centre of town, the drive through the forest park under a canopy of trees, and the lake and castle at the end of it. She decided there and then that this was where she wanted to live, without having discussed it with her partner Andy first.

Andy, from Manchester and raised in Leeds, had never set foot in Ireland before the move. He struggled at first with the loss of privacy that comes with small town life, particularly the day an uncle drove past the bathroom window on a tractor while Andy was in the shower. Twenty years on, she says, he won’t leave.

The Mumsnet forum that changed everything

Slugs and Snails began in a freezing rented house up past Cool Fada, where Kathleen and Andy brought home their newborn son Noah in 2008. Standard jeans didn’t fit him comfortably, so her mother suggested putting him in tights instead. Kathleen loved the result, until she noticed people kept assuming Noah was a girl because the tights were pink.

She went looking online for boys’ tights and found a large Mumsnet forum full of parents asking the same question: why doesn’t anyone make these for boys? She saw the gap immediately and decided to fill it.

“I googled boys tights and found a massive Mumsnet forum. I straight away thought, there’s a gap in the market.”

Everyone she knew, apart from her own parents, told her it was a bad idea. It took three years to find a factory willing to manufacture tights as full leggings rather than the standard design, which stopped at the hemline because it was made for girls. Slugs and Snails launched in November 2011 and turned a profit by December, helped along by Twitter, a handful of well known parents, and the mum bloggers who dominated parenting content at the time.

Ireland’s longest running independent children’s wear brand

The name comes from the old nursery rhyme about what little boys are made of, and it drew some criticism early on from people who felt it excluded girls. Kathleen’s answer is that girls’ clothing already came in far more colours and patterns; she simply wanted the same range of choice for boys, inspired by the handed down green and red jumpers she wore as a child alongside her older brothers.

The business grew from the kitchen table to the bedroom to the Boyle Enterprise Centre and eventually to an office of its own, adding socks and then, in 2020, loungewear. Covid had shut down every physical shop overnight, and nobody was buying fourteen pound tights for children who weren’t going anywhere. Kathleen developed a range of waffle cotton pyjamas, a fabric she remembered wanting badly as a child after seeing it in America but never being able to find in Ireland.

The first small order shipped in for around two hundred and twenty pounds. Selling out fast, she reordered, only for the same size shipment to cost close to eight thousand pounds the second time around, a result of global shipping chaos and large retailers buying up container space to squeeze out smaller competitors. Waffle cotton nonetheless became the product that kept the business afloat.

“We are unemployable. We cannot fail. This is all we have. There’s no going back.”

Brexit hit the wholesale side hard, cutting Kathleen’s active retailers from around 120 down to roughly 48. Slugs and Snails has never taken out paid advertising, relying instead on organic traffic, repeat customers and word of mouth. Kathleen now describes it as Ireland’s longest running independent children’s wear brand, a milestone she holds onto even as she jokes about her actual retirement plan involving a Georgian house and a Laura Ashley dress that, by her own admission, is never going to happen.

Fourteen days without power

Kathleen speaks candidly about Storm Éowyn, during which she and her family went fourteen days without electricity and, for periods, without water. She credits the Boyle Family Life Centre and local shops such as Sloane’s, who rationed gas bottles fairly so no single customer could clear the shelf, with keeping the town going through the worst of it.

She is critical of what she sees as long term underinvestment in rural electricity infrastructure, pointing to legislation requiring cleared margins around power lines that was never properly enforced as forestry grew up around them.

“I’ve lived here twenty years. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A time capsule for Boyle

Asked what she would put in a time capsule for future generations of the town, Kathleen doesn’t hesitate. A proper record of the traditional folk cures still used and shared around Boyle, still passed on by phone number rather than in any book. The wisdom of the town’s older residents. A St Bridget’s Cross. And something of Lough Key, a place she still finds, twenty years on, genuinely magical.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and introduction

00:37 Born in West Hampstead, London, to Irish parents

01:13 Family roots in Athlone and Galway

01:56 Childhood summers in Roscommon and collecting cat’s eyes off the road

02:15 Moving to Boyle in 2005

02:29 Starting Slugs and Snails from the kitchen table

03:11 The Mumsnet forum that revealed the gap in the market

03:59 “You’re mental”: the reaction from everyone except her parents

04:18 Three years to find a factory that could make what she wanted

04:53 Launching in November 2011 and turning a profit within weeks

06:15 Marketing on Twitter before Instagram existed

07:30 Mum bloggers, backlinks and finding out later it was all SEO

09:00 Why Slugs and Snails, and the pushback over “boys only”

12:21 Early hurdles building the business

14:28 Celebrity supporters, from Ronnie Wood’s wife to Justin Bieber’s sister-in-law

15:29 Why Instagram works and TikTok never will

16:16 Outgrowing a “mum and dad” business

17:07 The millionaire dream and the Georgian house that isn’t coming

17:52 Ireland’s longest running independent children’s wear brand

18:20 First impressions of Boyle: the clock, the forest park, the lake and the castle

19:33 Andy’s move from Leeds, and the tractor that drove past the bathroom window

21:11 What’s changed in Boyle since 2005

22:48 Moving three days before the London bombings

22:59 How her definition of home has shifted

30:52 Covid: closed overnight with no wage coming in

33:04 Brexit and the retailers that never came back

34:58 The waffle cotton pyjamas that saved the business

37:22 Shipping containers, the Suez Canal and an order that cost eight thousand pounds

1:09:00 Storm Éowyn and fourteen days without power

1:12:11 Forests, power lines and a warning nobody acted on

1:13:55 Rationing gas and the people who kept the town going

1:20:25 What she loves about the community in Boyle

1:20:57 Building a time capsule: the cure, the elders, St Bridget’s Cross and Lough Key

1:25:47 Where to find Slugs and Snails

Guest Bio

Kathleen Redmond is the founder of Slugs and Snails, Ireland’s longest running independent children’s wear brand. Born in London to Irish parents, she moved to Boyle in 2005 and built the business from her kitchen table with her husband Andy, starting with boys’ tights and growing into socks and loungewear sold across Ireland, the UK and further afield.