Dear Gigante: isn’t Hope Macaulay already doing this?
By Fernando Santos
“Dear Gigante, honest question: isn’t Hope Macaulay already doing what you do? Your cardigans look so similar to hers, and she’s rather brilliant. How do you fit in?”
What a message. This one arrived through the Ask Gigante form, but I’ve been asked versions of it at fairs, in DMs, and once, memorably, by my own mother. So let me answer it properly, because the honest answer starts with total agreement.
First: yes, the niche has a queen
Hope Macaulay is amazing. She built an entire knitwear house from Northern Ireland in her early twenties. Her pieces are hand-knitted by a team of local makers she employs and champions, which means every one of her cardigans carries real livelihoods inside it. She took bold, oversized knitwear from a craft-fair curiosity to the pages of fashion magazines, and she did it on her own terms. And the cardigans themselves? Stunning. There is no version of this answer where I pretend otherwise, because I own eyes.
So how do we stand a chance? Because we’re not standing in the same spot
Look closely at what each of us actually sells. When you buy a Hope Macaulay piece, you’re buying finished wearable art: designed by her, made by expert hands, arriving ready to wear. It’s her work, and that’s precisely its value. (And yes, before a sharp-eyed reader writes in: she offers a few patterns too. But cardigan patterns like ours, graded across every size, with kits, hand-prepped wool and video support for complete first-timers? That’s not her business. It’s the whole of ours.)
When you come to Gigante, you’re buying something she has never sold: the making. A pattern with every row laid out. A kit with the wool hand-prepped and weighed for your size. A video by your side for the wobbly first evening. And then hours of your own hands in it, and the quiet right to answer “where did you get that?” with “I made it.”
Hope sells the dream. I sell how to make it.
Nobody choosing between us was ever really choosing between us. If what you dream of is owning a Macaulay, buy the Macaulay; you’ll treasure it, and you’ll be supporting something genuinely good. But if looking at one made your hands itch, if the thought you had was I wonder if I could make something like that, then the itch was never for her product. It was for ours.
“But the work looks so similar”
It does, in the way that all sourdough looks like sourdough. Giant stitches and joyful colour are the shared language of chunky knitting, and no one owns a language. What can be owned are the designs themselves, and there I’ll be plain: our designs are our own, drawn up stitch by stitch in our own studio, and we work hard not to copy anyone’s, hers most of all. If loving the same wool at the same glorious scale counts as imitation, then every knitter who ever cast on something big is guilty of it together, and what a lovely crime that would be.
Where do our designs come from, then? Before knitwear I spent years as a graphic designer, and it turns out that training transfers: proportion, colour balance, composition, and all the other bits and bobs that decide whether a bold thing looks considered or merely loud. When I draw a colour-block cardigan, I’m using the same eye I once used on layouts and brands. Our palettes and panels come from that discipline, not from anyone’s lookbook.
And here’s the secret about “dominated”
My dream was never to take a slice of a niche. It’s for chunky knitwear to stop being a niche at all. I genuinely believe anyone has the skill and the power to make something beautiful with their own hands; my whole job is to be the enabler who hands you the wool, the pattern and the confidence, then gets out of your way.
And the making side of this craft isn’t winner-takes-all. Quite the opposite: every person Hope inspires to fall for oversized knitwear creates ten more who wonder whether they could knit one themselves. She grows the very garden we plant in. When her work crosses your feed and your heart does that little skip, one of two doors opens, and only one of them is hers. We’re simply standing at the other one, holding the needles.
So no, I don’t lie awake worrying about competing with Hope Macaulay. I lie awake hoping that one day, if Gigante becomes even one percent of what she has built, I’ll get to feel a fraction of the pride she must feel about what she’s given this craft. Until then: she makes hers, you make yours, and the world gets more enormous cardigans in it. Everybody wins.
PS. Hope, if you’re ever reading this: consider the whole page fan mail. I love what you’ve built, and if you ever fancy collaborating on something enormous, my needles and my hands are ready.
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