How we work
Six rules, in the order they arrived
None of these is original. Together they are the whole business.
I did not set out to make a sustainable label. I set out to be able to answer a question about my own coat, and the answer turned out to require rebuilding almost everything. These are the six rules that came out of that, in the order they arrived.
Know the mill
I do not buy cloth I have not seen made. It removes about ninety per cent of what is available and it is the only rule that has never bent.
Undyed unless it must be
Dyeing is the dirtiest step in a garment's life. Eight of our nine cloths are the colour the fibre already was. The ninth goes in a vat I stir myself.
Buy what exists first
A cancelled mill order has already spent its water. Using it and capping the edition is better than commissioning something new and calling it responsible.
Cap the edition, tell the truth
When a deadstock roll ends, the piece ends. Shops get an email rather than a substitution. It costs us reorders and buys us their trust.
Make it where you are
Everything is cut and sewn in this building, by four people on a salary, forty kilometres at most from every mill and knitter we use.
Publish the arithmetic
Wholesale price, retail price, edition size, mill. All of it on the label and on this site. If a number is embarrassing, the fix is the number, not the page.
Who makes it
Four people, one floor
Everyone here is on a salary and nobody is a contractor. It is the single biggest line in the cost of a garment.
02 Rui Almeida Pattern cutter and grader Thirty-one years in Guimarães factories. Pads the Rua Jacket collars by hand.
03 Ana Ferreira Sample machinist Has sewn in this building longer than we have rented it. Works every buttonhole.
04 Emeka Duarte Knit and dye technician Runs the indigo vat and drives to Barcelos every fortnight to sit with the knitter.The workroom
Rua de São Victor 44
Six photographs, taken on an ordinary Tuesday. Nothing was tidied for them, which you can tell.
The record
Where all this came from
Nine years of somebody else's pattern rooms before any of it, and a school in Antwerp before that.
Nila Sequeira
Designer and pattern cutter · Anais, Porto
I run a ten-piece womenswear label out of one building in Bonfim. I buy undyed and deadstock cloth from mills I have stood in, dye what needs colour myself, and publish the whole record of every garment. Before this I cut patterns for other people for nine years.