This Valentine’s Day we look back at the love story at the heart of Love Brand - how the founders met and how it all came to be. 

In 2010 Oliver met Rose in London for the first time. A fateful meeting as Oliver’s sister had met Rose in Australia earlier that year and had said to Oliver he would fall in love with her one day. As fate would have it, Rose moved back to London and their paths did cross and they started dating.

At that time Oliver was designing his ultimate beachwear brand and developed all his ideas with Rose, travelling together and drawing inspiration from the easy-breezy lifestyle of the Bahamas outer islands, where Rose has family ties. The couple also had a shared affinity with elephants and dedicated the brand to helping, first designing the logo of two elephants forming a heart on a napkin on a date. This was the original love in Love Brand, simply a brand with a loving ethos to help elephants. The idea of elephant-loving men’s swimming trunks was born.

Efforts went into creating sustainable swimming trunks and beachwear that would be kind to the planet while also supporting charities that help endangered wildlife and rural communities. In 2011, our swimming trunks hit the shop floor of Selfridges with the trademark line “Trunks for Trunks”. For over a decade since, Oliver has designed and built the brand continuing to shape each idea with his girlfriend-now-wife, Rose. Oliver and Rose married in 2014 and later had two children before moving to live in the Bahamas and now have another member of the Love Brand (Tomalin) family on the way this Summer.

This Valentine’s Day, we share some family pictures of Oliver and Rose in the Bahamas, back on the beaches of the outer islands where their brand was first born and we ask them what ‘Love’ means to them both. 

Oliver says “for me, the meaning of love, is family. I feel so lucky to have the little family I love.”

“Family is one of our four ‘loves’ in Love Brand. The love of island life and the enjoyment of life, the love of wildlife and especially elephants, the love of our planet and the desire to travel and tread lightly, and last but not least, the love of family.”

Rose says ”for me, love isn’t just as simple as a feeling. It is also a choice. A choice to really and truly invest time, care and commitment into something or someone you truly and deeply care about. I am so fortunate that my life seems to burst at the seams with love. A love for my wonderful husband and family and the cause we have chosen to give so much of our time to. It is all immersive and all-encompassing.”

“Love also, for me, is that feeling of being totally safe, totally at one with the person you love or the choices you make to do good. To feel safe enough to follow your heart is to love and to give your heart is to give yourself freely and openly to whatever you commit yourself to. There is nothing more pure or more real to me.”