How it is made

Everything comes off the same floor, in a family-run knitting mill outside Porto that has been running since 1974. Three generations of the same family, about forty people, and the loopback machines they started with.

Those machines run at roughly a third of the speed of a modern one. The slower a loopback knit is made, the less the yarn is stretched as it goes in, and the less it wants to shrink back later. It is the single biggest reason a five-year-old crew still looks like the new one next to it.

Organic long-staple cotton, grown in the Aegean and spun in Portugal. Long staple means longer individual fibres, which means fewer ends poking out of the yarn, which means less pilling and a fabric that stays smooth rather than going fuzzy.

It costs about 40% more than the standard short-staple alternative. It is the one place we have never found a way to save money that we were willing to take.

Fabric is washed twice at the mill before a single piece is cut. That takes the shrink out early, while it is still a roll and nobody has paid for it, rather than later in your machine.

It means we lose a few percent of every roll to shrinkage and have to cut the patterns larger to compensate. It also means the sweatshirt you try on is the size it will stay.

Reactive dyed at low temperature over about four hours, rather than hot and fast in one. Slower dyeing bonds more of the pigment into the fibre instead of leaving it sitting on the surface to wash away.

We wash a garment from every dye lot fifty times and measure the colour before the lot is allowed out. If it has drifted, it does not ship.

Cutting a pattern out of a roll wastes about 15% of the fabric no matter how well you nest the pieces. Ours goes back to a shredder two hours away and comes out as insulation. None of it is burned and none of it goes to landfill.