A Brand Apart

KINDOM was launched by the artists of {DOM} to bring genuine individuality to the High Street at affordable prices.

We design, manufacture and sell an ever-dynamic range of accessories bags, scarves, belts, pendants, earrings, rings as well as expressive pieces for the home such as plates, sculptures and prints. Our designs are characterised by strength of shape and colour and by being unlike anything you are likely to find on the High Street.

We appeal to those of every generation who yearn for 'something different'. We appeal to all who wish to express individuality and fly the flag for the principle of difference.

While using factory production approaches to keep things affordable, we introduce the principle of individuality into those processes to ensure the uniqueness of each thing sold. By bringing inventiveness to bear on each thing made, we guarantee that 'KINDOM products got soul'.

About the Name

You might assume from the logo that the company is called Kingdom. Well our shops are certainly magical and we are definitely a law unto ourselves. However, a closer look at the logo reveals that the 'G' is not a 'G' and that the name is actually KINDOM. 'KIN' as in 'of the family' and {DOM} which is the Russian word for house or home. {DOM} is in fact a non-commercial arts project which KINDOM was set up to support. You can read about the work of DOM on this site.

A Brief History

KINDOM was launched on Glasgow's Buchanan Street in 2003 where it traded for two and a half years before moving to York's Low Petergate at the end of 2005. Glasgow was a fitting birthplace because it brims with revolutionary energy but York is great because it - like the brand - has an easy relation with antiquity.

The History of an Idea:

Artists have always loved to design because through design, art can find its proper place in people's daily lives. It follows that the High Street is a natural platform for artistic design to thrive.

It all started with William Morris and the British Arts & Crafts Movement. Morris identified retail as the key route by which art can enter people's daily lives and the Liberty department store was founded in that spirit.

The Movement's principles travelled swiftly to the continent. In fin de siecle Vienna, the artists of the Vienna Secession founded a shop on Vienna's main shopping street selling clothes, jewellery, homewares and the like to help support their avant-garde instincts as artists.

The high point of the idea came with the Bauhaus 'colleges' in inter-war Germany where avant-garde art studies were balanced with commercial design. Through this institution, the leading artists of the day were invigorating German industry withtheir design imagination. Hitler dismissed the enterprise as 'degenerate' and it relocated to the US and focussed principally on architecture. The German Bauhaus design aesthetic nonetheless dominated the second half of the 20th century. Habitat and Ikea are both indebted to this pioneering project.

Time moves on though and in this globalised and mass produced age, people long for something individual and something with soul. Through KINDOM, the artists of DOM are able to answer this desire and thereby re-invigorate the link between art and the High Street.