About Us
Leo & Ada Sydney started with a cold lounge room, a stubborn grandmother, and forty years of "just rug up, you'll be fine."
Here's the thing nobody outside Australia believes: our houses are some of the coldest in the developed world. Not because of the weather outside — because of the walls, the windows, the heating that switches off at midnight and doesn't care that 6am exists. Ada always said the cold here "sneaks up on you," and after forty years of cold Sydney mornings, she stopped waiting for the heating to catch up and started knitting instead.
It began with one jumper, for her husband, because he kept stealing her blanket off the couch. Then one for each of the kids. Then the neighbours started asking where she got hers. By the time her grandson Leo was old enough to notice, half the street was walking around in Nan's jumpers, and nobody was cold anymore.
Years later, when Leo was old enough to actually do something about all the orders piling up in Ada's spare room, the two of them decided to make it official. We didn't open Leo & Ada Sydney to sell jumpers. We opened it because every Australian has a version of this story — someone in the family who just handles the cold, quietly, without making a fuss about it. We wanted more people to have that. Not imported, not mass-produced — pieces made the way Ada always made them, properly, so you only ever need one.
Every piece in our store is chosen together, with one simple question in mind: would this actually keep someone warm on a real Australian winter morning, the kind where the heating hasn't kicked in yet? Honest wool. Patterns that don't fall apart after one wash. Nothing thrown together just to look good in a photo.
Over time, Leo & Ada Sydney became something much bigger than one stubborn grandmother and her knitting needles. And that's entirely thanks to you — every order, every message telling us you finally stopped freezing on your own lounge room floor.
Now we're closing this chapter, the way Ada's always done things — properly, with nothing wasted. After three winters, we've made the difficult decision to wind things down. Every piece still in our store is heading to a good home before we go, which is why everything is up to 70% off while stock lasts.
Our promise hasn't changed: pieces you'll actually reach for on the mornings that matter, at prices that feel fair, from a small team that genuinely understands why you're rugging up indoors in a "warm" country.
With all our love, one last time,
Leo & Ada