Joey X Mitch
Stepping into my new role at Yuki, I wanted to dig deeper into the story behind the brand—the moments, people and places that shaped it long before I joined the crew. So, back where it all began at Mt Buller, I went for a walk to spin a yarn with co-founder Luke “Mitch” Mitchell to talk ski-bum beginnings, sewing oversized hoodies with a box of VBs, selling the first collection from the back of the Kooroora and how having a crack at 26 slowly grew into one of Australia’s most recognisable snowboard brands.
So, you started the brand at 26?
Something like that, yeah.
How do you go from being a 26-year-old ski bum and snowboarder to having one of the most recognisable snow companies in Australia?
Well, it just happens overnight like that, Joseph. And here we are. No, it was a very long, slow process—a lot of trial and error and having a crack.
I was doing seasons back-to-back between Japan and Buller. I wanted to keep doing seasons forever, but I also wanted to do something while I was doing it, so I was looking around and trying other things at the same time.
It also happened to be when tall hoodies were a huge trend, but the major brands hadn’t really cottoned on to it. You couldn’t actually go into a shop and buy one. They weren’t a thing.
There were a few people making them because it was this new trend. During one season at Buller, there was a dude doing it, and I tried to get one but couldn’t. Then my buddy was coming back from Canada and said, “I’m going to make a tall hoodie.”
I said, “Bro, you should fucking make heaps of them. I tried to get one and couldn’t.”
He said, “I think I’m going to make five.”
I was like, “Dude, you’ll sell them. Just make a shitload.”
Anyway, he came back to Oz, and we went down to Spotlight, got a bunch of fabric, pulled out his mum’s sewing machine and grabbed a box of VBs. Then we sewed up the first hoodies.
Did you already know how to sew at that point, or were you just watching?
No. I think I’d done something in class at school about how to sew, but absolutely not. We went down to Spotlight, found a pattern for a hoodie and added this much to the bottom.
There’s a photo of it, everything was bright as hell.
Highlighter?
Yeah. The first one I made had different-coloured arms and fluoro tiger-print fluffy stuff on the pocket and inside the hood. It was the rudest thing going around, but I thought it was so sick at the time.
Did the first one hold up?
Yeah, I still have one. I was going through some stuff the other day and found it. Obviously, I haven’t worn it for a long, long time, but it’s still there.
I was also talking to Nick Jack at Freeride just then, and he’s still got some of the OG ones. They’re still around, but they were very rudimentary. Obviously, they weren’t made as well as the hoodies we make now, but they’ve held up for sure.
What was the first thing you ever made?
The first thing we ever made as Yuki Threads was actually the beanies. It was the Bird Beanie, which is still in the range now and has been there since day one.
That happened by mistake. We had designed a bunch of hoodies and crewnecks, which were the main focus, and then we did some beanies on the side. But the beanies arrived before the hoodies.
If I knew anything about marketing back then, I could have said I planned it and that it was a great strategy, but I absolutely did not. It actually worked out really well because we were selling them around Buller, and they had a little yellow bird on them that no one had seen before.
We sold a whole bunch to our friends, so everyone was walking around with these yellow birds on their heads. By the time the hoodies and crewnecks arrived, everyone had heard about this little bird and the brand.
When we had our first night selling them out the back of the Kooroora, everyone already knew what they were. I didn’t intend for it to be a marketing thing, but it turned out really well. That stuff happens all the time in business, I guess.
That probably wasn’t the answer you were going for, but you probably didn’t know that.
It’s always scary to put yourself out there. When you first started making things, were the products received well? What was the initial vibe around Yuki?
It was actually kind of wild because it came from this really cool scene of handmade hoodies. Lani was making hoodies under a little brand called MLK, and our friends Dozy and Krista were making them under a brand called Joy Out.
They were all custom, so people would come in and say, “I want this pink hood, this blue body and these yellow arms.” I remember Lani had a sewing machine that could do embroidered stitching, so you could stitch stars over things.
It was really cool because it was so expressive. Everyone would come in with their ideas, and Lani would have them over for a glass of wine and say, “I’ve got this fabric and this fabric.” It became this whole experience. It was so sick.
That was the year before we started Yuki, so there was already this culture around expressive hoodies, and people were really behind it. The hoodies we released in those first few years were actually pretty pared back, but we already had a lot of support from our friends in the Mt Buller community, who had seen the crew making handmade hoodies.
Everyone was frothing from the get-go. It was something new and different, and there weren’t brands popping up everywhere at the time. I think everyone was proud to have a brand from Buller that their mates were creating. People were stoked to see something happening and to be part of it.
We made the products, but without the people backing us, being part of it and showing their support, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere. In my opinion, the people build the brand as much as the brand builds the brand.
What year was that?
That was 2011, which was our first year of product. We started in late 2010, when Lani and I said, “Okay, let’s do this thing.” Then our first season was in 2011.
How many seasons had you done at that point?
Only a couple of years. I grew up in Mansfield and started snowboarding there, but then moved from Mansfield to Albury and from Albury to Perth.
I was a mechanic by trade and did that until I was about 24. Then I moved to Whistler and did my first season. After that, I thought, “I’m not going back to the real world. I’m definitely not being a mechanic anymore.”
Growing up in Mansfield, so close to the snow, did you snowboard a lot when you were younger?
Not as much as I would have liked. As a little kid, I always saw people snowboarding and thought, “That is literally the coolest thing.”
We weren’t very wealthy growing up, so it wasn’t a sport I could just do on the weekends. I ended up getting an ex-rental board from the Pullins—Chumpy Pullin’s family. It was a Rossignol corn board with some old Northwave boots, which were basically Sorels. The whole setup cost $150.
I used to go up on Thursdays with Mansfield Secondary College. We’d have a lesson in the morning and freeride in the afternoon. That was really the only time I got to go. I think I went up on one or two weekends, but through the school it was about $40 for the whole day. On the weekend, you had to pay for a full-price lift ticket and everything else.
I grew up snowboarding a little, but not as much as I would have liked. I loved it, though. There were kids who would leave school and come up to work as lifties, and they were the fucking coolest people on the planet. You’d go up on a Thursday, see the crew pulling T-bars and think, “Fuck, that dude’s so cool.”
Starting a business and building a brand is never easy. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made throughout the life of the company? What’s one thing that could have absolutely flattened the whole thing?
Without a doubt, it was what we ended up calling the Ugly Fruit. Once again, the community saved us, but we’ll get to that.
When we started, I didn’t know anything about anything. We just began making products using conventional cotton, and we didn’t really know where the fabric came from. I knew where we sourced it because I’d visited our manufacturers and they told me, “It comes from down the road. They’re the fabric people.”
But when I asked where those people got it from, they didn’t know. I thought, “We should probably know where it comes from. What if it comes from a bad place? What if child labour is involved?”
That sparked the change from simply making products because we didn’t know any better to realising we needed to make responsible products and change our processes. We moved to Fairtrade organic cotton and made all these changes, which was awesome.
During that process, I pushed the envelope a little too far without doing enough testing. Organic cotton is awesome, but you still need to grow it and use water and other natural resources. I found out that we could use recycled cotton and recycled PET, which would save a lot of resources, so I thought, “We should do this.”
When the finished bulk production arrived, we discovered that the fleece inside the hoodies was loose and shedding. It was okay after about five washes, but we couldn’t sell them like that. I thought, “What the fuck do we do?”
I also found out on my birthday. We were predominantly a hoodie company at that stage, and every hoodie we had made for the entire season was like this. They were basically fucked, and I didn’t know what to do.
In the end, we created the Ugly Fruit campaign. We had all these hoodies that were good but not perfect. We couldn’t waste them or throw them into landfill. Too much time and energy had gone into them—from the design and fabric production to the cutting and sewing. They had to be used.
We told our community the story exactly as it was: “This is what’s happened. They’re still good; they’re just not perfect.” It was like ugly fruit—they had a few bumps and bruises, but they were still good.
Instead of selling them for around $160, we sold them for $60. The whole community got behind us, and we sold nearly all of them in about a week. Without that, we would have been out of business—100 per cent. That was our biggest challenge, and the people literally pulled us through it.
That’s why I always say that we made the products, but people bought them. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
It’s also why we’re a community-focused company today. That has been part of our journey from day one—from selling hoodies out of boxes in the pub to our friends, to the community saving our arse.
For us, holding days like Yuki Birds and other events is about the relationship we have with our community. There’s a give-and-take between us and them, and that’s what a good relationship looks like to me.
When did you realise this was something you could do full-time—that it was more than a little hoodie-making side gig? When did you decide to go all in?
That’s an interesting one because, for at least the first four years, I was working two or three jobs, doing Yuki on the side and working seasons. I didn’t have a massive plan in those days; I was just doing it.
There was one summer when I didn’t do a season, and we made some products for another company—a “By Yuki” kind of thing. I think it was going to bring in about $15,000, which seems funny now, but I thought, “Cool, that’s enough money for me to go all in and get through this next little bit.”
I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll do it and see what happens.”
It’s funny because Yuki has been going for so long now, but in my mind it’s still this little thing. I still look at it and think, “I guess I’m doing it.” I still feel like I’m in start-up mode, asking, “Are we doing it? Oh yeah, we’re doing it.”
I’ve never reached a point where I’ve thought, “We’re crushing it. We’ve got this. I can relax now.” Holidays are still few and far between.
It was probably around the fifth year that I made the jump. Since then, it has still felt like we’re doing it, but not that we’ve made it.
We’re behind the new Kooroora, which would have been the old Kooroora when you worked here. Was that your main job when you were at Buller?
Yeah. This used to be the back of the staff accommodation and the pub. There was a back door that was never open, but naughty stuff used to go in and out of there.
During my first season here, I worked at Grimus with Hans Grimus. I worked in the rental shop because I’d done a season in retail rentals in Whistler, then came back and got a job there.
That season, I also got a part-time job as a bussie at the pub. After that, I worked at the pub full-time because I quickly realised that working nights was better than working days—it meant I could snowboard during the day.
The pub was basically here and probably extended a fair bit further over there. It was an institution. I never realised how much one place could affect an entire town.
It was the meeting point—everyone’s lounge room. People lived in small accommodation, but they could come here. There was the members’ section at the front, everyone sitting at the bar, Buck Hunter, the pool tables out the back and the restaurant.
At any time of day, you knew who would probably be there. You might think, “McPhail might be there,” then duck in and have a game of Buck with him. Nine times out of ten, you knew he—or someone else doing their thing—would be there.
When it was torn down, it changed the dynamic of the town. Obviously, it has changed again now, and that’s all good, but it was crazy that this little wooden box had such a big impact on the whole place.
During my second year, when I was working there full-time, we launched Yuki. I spoke to Nicole, who managed the pub, and told her what was happening. I said, “I’m going to have a heap of boxes, and I want to hold a night to sell everything.”
She said, “Yeah, no worries.”
We picked a day and a time—something like four o’clock on a Tuesday. I must have put actual signs up around town, and Facebook was a thing, so I think we promoted it there too. The plan was to set everything up out the back and sell it from there.
I remember arriving with all these boxes. I even had a cash register with a printer for receipts and everything, which I obviously didn’t use.
When I walked in, the pub was full of people. I remember thinking, “There are a lot of people here for this time of day.” It didn’t click that they were there for us—but it turned out they were.
As I said before, people had seen the yellow Bird Beanies, and I think there had been enough talk around town.
I’d calculated how much we needed to sell to make our money back. Lani and I had saved some money from our season in Japan, and our thinking was, “This is how much it will cost, this is how much we need to sell to break even—fuck it, let’s do it.”
We made that money back on the first night. It was wild. The place was full, everyone was pulling things out of boxes, and the energy was so high. It was so sick.
I think we held two nights—or two afternoons—but that first one blew me away. I remember thinking, “Holy shit, this is so cool.”
Were they all one-of-one hoodies at that point, or were they part of a collection?
No, that was our first proper run. We had the Old Mate Hoodie in a slim fit and a regular or relaxed fit. We also had a crewneck and possibly two zip-ups. That was the range, so they weren’t one-of-ones.
Any closing thoughts?
It’s actually great to literally have a walk down memory lane, around Buller and talk through this with you in the place that it all began. It’s been a wild, wild ride. It seems so long ago when Lani was making hoodies and we started this thing and I mentioned it a few times in there but it is actually crazy how much the community plays a role in a brand such as ours. It’s so special, so thank you so much to everyone who has been a part of the journey whether it was way back when or someone who might have just heard of the brand. You guys really are the ones that make it all happen, so thank you.
See you on the hill :)
Mitch
