Tiger Blood | Blind Tiger Collective

Blind Tiger Collective opening new store on South William Street.

Following the success of their four day pop up shop that appeared in the Little Green Street Gallery last Christmas, the Dublin-based streetwear cooperative Blind Tiger Collective will open the doors to a new, fulltime store on South William Street this Saturday.

Consisting of ten independent Irish brands, the group’s aim is to provide a platform for home-grown companies in the rag trade to compete against bigger brands and established chain stores.

The venture is primarily being propelled by collective members Robert Ryan, owner of clothing brand Lady Umbrella, and Dualta Jones, who runs Project A Apparel. The duo has overseen the development of the space and will work in the shop as sales assistants.

“The majority [of the collective] are in college at the moment so don’t have the time to hand over,” explains Dualta. “There’s a core collective who have put their money where their mouth is, and then that grows out to people who have been involved before. People do help in different ways but a lot of the ground work is done by the people who [working in] the shop.”

Dualta started Project A Apparel with his girlfriend Francesca Griffin in 2005. Designing T-shirts, the couple were largely influenced by the urban feel of graffiti and street art. Dualta, who was studying architecture, describes the project as being “a release” at the time. “The unfortunate thing was whenever I was trying to do something, there was always something going on in college,” says Dualta, now a graduate. “Now I’ve got the opportunity to do this. I might not be considered cool enough in five years to run a street wear company, but I’m pretty sure I could fall into architecture again if I wanted to. I enjoyed architecture, but this was something I had a certain amount of passion for.”

The Blind Tiger Collective pop up shop at Little Green Street Gallery.

With nine other members of Blind Tiger Collective, the group are dedicated in stocking their new store with quality streetwear at a good price, encourage consumers to support local creativity. “I think our first Ethos is definitely to buy Irish, but we’re not going to just stand on just being Irish,” says Dualta. “As it goes, we all mostly have an interest in the street wear side of fashion, and I think that’s lacking in Dublin. Most of it is Father Ted quotes and it got kind of annoying.”

As well as just being a retail experience, Dualta also hopes that the store will provide punters with a social outlet. “We’ll definitely go down the street of the skatewear store where it’s a community almost. Places like Supreme in New York, they started off because it’s the place where all the kids went to. We’d love to have a place to sit and relax. Even to come in a talk to us for a while. What we’ll also be adding is a certain amount of exhibitions space. We’ll have photography exhibitions, art exhibitions; we’ll be quite open to whatever comes in. We’ll try and punch for the little guy in that sense.”

We’re Back! from Andrey Andonov on Vimeo.

The Blind Tiger Store is located at 51 South William Street, Dublin 2 and will have their official launch this Saturday evening. For more information visit the Facebook event page here.

Dean Van Nguyen for stylesiren.ie

Dean Van Nguyen is editor of One More Robot magazine – check out the latest issue here or follow Dean on Twitter @deanvannguyen.