Doireann Healy on Begley & Bowie, going viral, Kenmare life, and her latest venture

Doireann Healy launched her cult label Begley & Bowie when she was on a career break from teaching. It was an overnight success. Her latest venture sees her host fellow trailblazing creatives for conversation designed to inspire

Irish designer Doireann Healy at Begley & Bowie, Kenmare, Co Kerry. Picture Dan Linehan

“She used to say, ‘you can be anything’.” Doireann Healy is talking about her late mother, Joan, who was, she says, “my greatest inspiration”. 

Just like her daughter, Joan — who died in March — was a go-getter who embraced opportunity and life to the full. 

Having completed her final year of schooling in Dublin’s Loreto on the Green, Joan took the advice of a teacher and applied to be PA for “a new guy after arriving from the BBC who is launching a show called The Late Late”. 

That guy was, of course, Gay Byrne and Joan worked as his PA for 10 years before leaving to study her twin passions of English and history at UCD. 

“Gay was family to her,” Healy says. “Gay and Kathleen took this Kerry girl and had her out at their house all the time. They bought her first typewriter and her first bottle of perfume.”

Years later, Joan would watch The Late Late Show’s credits roll and comment on senior staff who in her day had been in charge of menial tasks, using the example to show her children that, with determination and graft, you can be anything.

“It inspired me to believe that you can,” says Healy, who has been taking her mother’s sage advice and running with it ever since.

The industrious Kenmare woman is possibly best known for her Begley & Bowie-brand vibrant slogan sweatshirts, but she’s also an interior designer, teacher, illustrator, screen printer, shop owner, and can now add event planner to her many hats (and she’s mulling over a podcast.). 

Her latest venture, which she’s been thinking about doing “for years,” is A Colourful Life.

Doireann Healy: “I launched my store in Kenmare on the Tuesday and I launched in Brown Thomas on the Wednesday. It was a crazy time. At that stage, a lot of companies were reaching out to me to design for them as well.” Picture Dan Linehan

“The idea is creative conversations in beautiful locations,” Healy says of the upcoming series of talks which will take place at the gorgeous Park Hotel in Kenmare, the owners of which were “so helpful and encouraging”, when she put the idea to them, as have been the women to whom Healy will be chatting. 

Helen Steele, Shelly Corkery, Peigín Crowley, Joanne Hynes, Geri O’Toole — all are pioneering creatives in their respective fields, and just like Healy, all are strong women who have trailblazed their own paths to success.

Healy herself is hugely successful. She started her career in interior design before becoming a teacher — “my mom always said ‘get a degree’. So I went and I did teaching” — but the pull of illustration and fashion was always there. 

So in 2019, having taken a career break, she launched art and fashion brand Begley & Bowie (her beloved childhood dogs were named for Séamus Begley and David Bowie) with her now famous placename sweatshirts going viral from their launch (think ‘New York Paris Dingle London Milan’ arranged in a neon listicle).

“‘We were inundated with people asking me would I do [sweatshirts] for their places. It went crazy and overnight Begley & Bowie just took off.”

And it didn’t let up.

“I realised this is becoming too big,” she recalls thinking in 2020. “There was an awful lot of media interest. Brown Thomas reached out” — for its annual influential Irish design showcase CREATE.

“I launched my store in Kenmare on the Tuesday and I launched in Brown Thomas on the Wednesday. It was a crazy time. At that stage, a lot of companies were reaching out to me to design for them as well.”

SUSTAINABILITY

The interior of Bowie & Begley in Kenmare. Picture Dan Linehan

Healy was committed to sustainability from the start and sourced organic, ring-spun cotton from Belgium for her sweatshirts. 

“One of the first things I wanted was high-end, good-quality merch. Good-quality designs. I remember Amy Huberman came to one of my first pop-ups in Dublin. She was purchasing clothing and she just went ‘the quality of these’.”

Healy, based as she is on one of the tourist hotspots on the Ring of Kerry, felt “what people would buy is what tourists would buy”. 

Quality fashion that represented a modern Ireland would, she thought, have appeal for both customer bases. Her instincts were spot on, and high-end hotels such as Adare Manor and Dromoland Castle began to reach out with commissions. 

Healy set up a design studio, “and I’ve designed for 25 brands so far… everything from an orchestra to bars. It’s been crazy.”

Healy’s success is not accidental. Rather, it is the result of years of hard graft and a hunger to always keep learning. 

Doireann Healy: “My nana, the first thought she always had was, ‘how would I do it?’ She taught me that. I always query, ‘why are we getting someone, can we try it ourselves?’” Picture Dan Linehan

She grew up absorbing the influence of strong, entrepreneurial women who recognised the value of independence and a pioneering spirit. 

She spent the first five years of her life in Kenmare, then moved to the heart of the Cork Gaeltacht, where she was educated through Irish. Her paternal grandmother, Nóní Twomey — “a really strong character” — was a formative influence. 

The native Irish speaker ran a shop in Cúil Aodha, and was also a Bean a Tí, keeping 30 students every summer.

“She was a real businesswoman,” Healy recalls. “She built on an extension when no one did, so that she’d have dormitories for 30.”

Cúil Aodha is, of course, famous for the musical legacy of composer Seán Ó Riada, and as such “we had musicians from all over Ireland who sent their children to learn music. 

My siblings and I always say we saw the coolest teenagers. I was absorbing that and their fashion. It was incredible back then.”

Healy renovated her Kenmare store this year, and installed a café, naming it Nóní’s in honour of her late grandmother, with whom she shares an innate optimism, drive and can-do attitude. 

“My nana, the first thought she always had was, ‘how would I do it?’ She taught me that. I always query, ‘why are we getting someone, can we try it ourselves?’” 

Healy says. “I’m really into this belief that you can learn at any age and you can try; if you don’t succeed, fail and fail again.”

LANGUAGE AND COLOUR

Irish designer Doireann Healy outside Begley & Bowie, Kenmare, Co Kerry. Picture Dan Linehan

Healy is very aware of how her childhood immersion in the rich cultural landscape of her homeplace — along with the influence of her mum, who brought her children to poetry readings, art shows, fashion shows and instilled in them a love of history and literature — has shaped her appreciation of language, literature, music, and art. “It’s incredible the impact that culture has,” she says. 

“When you’re surrounded by it, you absorb it. It just opens you up to so much more. I love all types of music and literature. It instils a hunger for creativity and learning.”

Healy’s intrinsic understanding of language, culture and colour has resulted in an aesthetic that is instantly recognisable as uniquely hers. 

Her fashion is fresh, vibrant and modern, yet carries with it a sense of place that speaks of today’s Ireland; vivid, vibrant and quietly confident, like Healy herself. Not for her the four collections a year treadmill, she works to her own pace.

“No one rushes me,” she says. “I always know my customer, and any customer who loves fashion, they will wait.” And wait they do. As well as her signature sweatshirts, she has a stunning Irish linen range of separates “that’s made in Dublin by a lady”.

Irish designer Doireann Healy at Begley & Bowie, Kenmare, Co Kerry. Picture Dan Linehan

She loves her life in Kenmare — “There’s a sense of calm, it’s not a manic life here” — and finds her relatively remote location a boon rather than hindrance. Customers seek out her beautiful store, and she loves that she “has time to talk to people”.

Talking is what she’ll be doing much more of with A Colourful Life. She knows and has been inspired by all the women who’ll feature, and feels that the conversations present an incredible learning opportunity, a sharing of knowledge for those aspiring to be part of the fashion, wellness or interiors worlds.

“It’s also to show that you don’t have to follow the straight path. Look at me. I’m in a completely different world to what I set out upon. I really think it’s an opportunity for anyone of any age, young or old, to come in and see how it’s done.”

• ‘A Colourful Life: Doireann Healy In Conversation with Peigín Crowley’ will take place at the Park Hotel Kenmare, Co Kerry on July 5. For tickets see eventbrite.ie.