Our Story

A love letter to handmade silk

Founded in 2020 by a Vietnamese mother in England — for the daughter she wanted to leave something beautiful.

My name is Tran. I started Silk & Bears in the quiet of the 2020 lockdown — the year I turned forty-two, in England, a long way from the country I grew up in.

I am Vietnamese. I have made my home in the United Kingdom, in the Peak District — a landscape of stone walls and slow weather that has become, in its own way, a second homeland. But the silk in this story belongs to the first one.

Why I began

In March 2021, my daughter was born — half-English, half-Vietnamese, and the reason for almost everything that has followed. I wanted to leave her something. Not money, not a name, but something she could hold in her hands: a piece of her mother's country, made carefully and slowly, that she could one day inherit and recognise as hers.

So I began to build it — the way the women in my family have always made things that were meant to last.

I wanted her to inherit more than a name. I wanted her to inherit the colour of the silk her grandmothers knew.

Vietnam, our motherland

Every Silk & Bears scarf is hand-dyed in Vietnam, in the historic silk-weaving village of Nha Xa, in Hà Nam province — a place where mulberry silk has been spun, woven and dyed for generations, long before the modern luxury market existed.

The artisans there are the makers. Their mothers and grandmothers learned the same craft, in the same light, by the same river. I do not dye the silk myself, and I would never claim to. What I do is champion their work — and carry it, in a form that travels, to wardrobes here and around the world.

The Peak District, our second home

Silk & Bears is designed in England, in the Peak District, where I live. The two places — the Vietnamese village and the English hills — are the two halves of this brand, just as they are the two halves of my daughter. The thread that runs between them is silk.

What we make

Hand-dyed mulberry silk scarves and shawls. Fluid silk dresses. Silk for sleep. Each piece is dyed individually, which means no two are exactly alike — the colour lives in the silk rather than sitting on top of it. And every order, however small, arrives in our signature gift box, as standard. Silk this carefully made deserves to arrive well.

We are a small brand, and we mean to stay one — small enough that every decision still passes through one pair of hands, and one quiet promise: to keep this craft alive, and to pass it on.

If you would like to go further: read about the artisans and how the silk is made, or see where Silk & Bears has been featured in the press.

— Tran, Founder

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