Our Story
Brighton studio. Anatolian hands.
Slow pieces, made by hand. Designed by the sea in Brighton, crocheted in homes across Anatolia. It started with one cardigan.
How it started
Three strangers in one hour
One afternoon, Zeynep was walking through Brighton in a cardigan her mother had crocheted for her by hand. A stranger stopped her and asked where it was from. Twenty minutes later, another. Within the hour, a third.
She turned to Ahmet and said: what if we opened somewhere?
21A Prince Albert Street
The smallest shop on the street
Eleven square metres in Brighton's Lanes. We painted the walls ourselves, replaced the ceiling tiles, and worked out how to hang 350 cardigans in a room the size of a kitchen.
The name
Ana means mother
In Turkish, Ana is mother. The women who crochet our pieces are mothers — to children, to the craft, to a tradition handed down through generations. And the craft itself comes from Anadolu: Anatolia, the land whose very name is full of Ana.
Anatolia has honoured the mother for thousands of years. Cybele, the great mother goddess, was worshipped on that ground long before Rome borrowed her. We did not invent the connection. We only carried it to the seaside.
The hands behind every piece
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Every piece is crocheted or knitted by one woman, working from her own home in Anatolia. There is no factory, and there never will be. Each design has a production cap set on the day it is drawn; past the cap, it retires and is never made again. Many pieces are made only once.
Shop the pieces →
The mark
The mark is a home
Before it was a logo, it was three drawings on a scrap of paper. A cross — the first stitch, where a hand meets the yarn. A heart — folded over until it became a shelter. A house — because that is where every piece is made: a woman's own home, with the kettle on and the afternoon light coming in sideways.
Drawn again and again, the three settled into a single line: the a of Ana. Look at where the lines end. They curl. That is the loop of a crochet hook — the yarn turning back on itself to hold.
Plainly
The facts, without the poetry
Our pieces are made in Türkiye, in homes across Anatolia, by women we work with directly. The yarns are organic cotton, wool and wool blends, certified GOTS and OEKO-TEX. Zero-waste principles hold from yarn to packaging: each order is wrapped in recycled card, with the maker's name inside.
Brighton
Come say hello
The shop that started it all is at 21A Prince Albert Street, in Brighton's Lanes. Zeynep is usually behind the counter. Every piece on the rails exists once — it is yours, or it isn't.
Brighton studio · Anatolian hands.