We've spent the better part of two years learning about fabrics. We’ve been researching which ones actually last, and what "aging well" means in terms of cloth rather than skin. It's hard not to notice how so much of what gets made now is some form of plastic, with new synthetic variations seemingly invented in a lab every week. None of that ever sat right with us.
We started the way most people probably do: communicating directly with mills and fabric manufacturers to receive their product list and available swatches. Some good, some bad, a couple actually sustainable, a few we'd rather not name. At a certain point in that process you lose your bearings entirely. After the hundredth fabric swatch, they all start to blur into the same fabric, and you lose any real sense of what actually feels good in your hands.
Somewhere in that search, the same phrase kept coming up on the industry's edges: dead stock, or surplus. It was enough to make us look closer.
In short, dead stock is fabric that made it all the way through production and development but was never sold. It happens more than you'd think. A brand develops a fabric with a mill, contracts them to make 1,300 metres of it and they’re off to the races. Traditionally, a mill will make a slight surplus, to accommodate for any spot blemishes in production. This will likely mean they’ll end up doing a 1,500-metre run of it, and, if the production all goes well, the leftover 200 metres has nowhere to go.
Traditionally, this material sits in a warehouse until it's either landfilled or incinerated. Both are bad enough on their own. What made it worse was realising how often this was happening to fabric of real quality, developed by luxury houses and milled by some of the most reputable names in the industry and still unwanted regardless.
That's the pocket of the industry we found that we actually believed in: intercepting that 200 metres before it becomes landfill, and giving it the life it was meant to have in the first place. There are a couple of ways of achieving this; working with agents who deal directly with mills to keep fabric out of landfill, or building those relationships with mills directly yourself. Either route is harder than simply ordering from a mil’s ready-to-order range: the seasonal textiles mills produce and make available to anyone who wants them.
Going the agent route means building a relationship that has to work for both parties. Agents act as your representatives, meeting with mills and sourcing fabrics against whatever brief you’ve given them. That kind of trust and understanding probably isn’t going to happen overnight. Unless you’re already attached to a reputable brand, you’re probably going to be one of their smaller clients, meaning some legwork on your end to establish and build that relationship.
The direct mill route was more convoluted. Mills don't generally catalogue their own excess stock, so the only way to find out what dead stock they're actually sitting on is to show up and look for yourself. There are only a handful of fully operational mills left in Australia, and while visiting all of them is technically possible, it adds up to a serious number of kilometres on the speedometer. Visiting the most reputable mills overseas swaps that problem for a different one: jet fuel replaces gasoline.
Once you're through the door, mills broadly split into two kinds: ones that produce their own seasonal ranges and sell directly to retailers, and ones that produce textiles privately, under contract, for individual fashion houses. We accepted some of our sourcing would likely come from the former, but we weren't inspired by designing around readily available fabric, and we didn't want to add to an already exorbitant amount of fabric in circulation by going the latter route.
It sent us down a genuine rabbit hole, but one we feel strongly enough about to stay in. The world doesn't need even more fabric produced, and we were never going to manufacture just to end up discarding it too. We eventually decided to work with an agent, hoping their experience and network could help us source what we were after. What we gained instead was access to fabric that's usually locked away entirely; it’s rare, expensive, and otherwise nearly impossible to get your hands on.
One of those fabrics we fell for immediately: a 100% herringbone merino wool. We knew, the moment we touched it, that we needed to create something out of it. It came with a history that's hard to make up. Originally farmed in New South Wales sometime in the 20th century, the wool was bought as high-grade merino by the USSR and milled into a deep grey herringbone intended for military uniforms. What happened next is murkier… But somewhere along the way, the Soviets ran out of money and sent the finished fabric back to the farm in NSW as penance for their outstanding bill. The farm wasn't set up as a mill, so the fabric was wrapped, stored, and largely forgotten about, sitting tightly in a temperature-controlled room for roughly forty years, until a Tasmanian company bought the property two years ago and found 1,000m of it perfectly preserved.
We decided the only fair response was to dedicate a full outfit to it: a jacket and a pleated pant.
There's something exciting about working with a fabric that's already survived this long. If we get our part right, it gets to take on a new life. Not sitting in storage, waiting to be buried or burned, but actually out in the world as something new, worn and hopefully loved.
Everything we learned chasing this fabric down ended up shaping more than just one outfit. It gave us the space to build a business model and a design hierarchy we're proud of. We think we’ve developed enough understanding of the material itself to bind ourselves to rules that keep us pointed in the right direction, even when it would be easier not to be. There’s much more to that hierarchy than we’ll get to today, the rest will follow in later entries, but here’s where it currently stands.
Dead Stock and Surplus: Our first choice, whenever it's available. Not every garment can be made this way; the fabric simply doesn't exist in the quantities we'd need. But it stays at the top of how we think about every design decision.
Natural Fibres: Linen and wool sourced from accredited, ethical, and sustainable practices, including RWS-certified wool (the Responsible Wool Standard), chosen for their genuinely low environmental impact.
Organic and Good Earth Cotton: When dead stock isn't an option, we use cotton from certified, sustainably and organically farmed sources only.
Recycled Fabrics: Fibres reclaimed from wool and cotton products that would otherwise have been discarded.
Closed-Loop Semi-Synthetics: Textiles like Tencel, made from natural resources such as wood fibre through a closed-loop process, often blended with natural fibres like cotton.
Waste Reduction: We produce in deliberately small quantities, partly by choice and partly because working with dead stock naturally limits how much of anything we can make.
Upcycling: Anything unsold gets reworked by hand into a one-off piece and released back into the world as a special edition, available only in that single size and never remade. Further down the line, we'll also run a buy-back scheme: bring us a garment of ours, and we'll take it back in exchange for a discount on something new, then give the old piece a second life through upcycling.
The Point of All of It: We want to make garments people wear often and keep for a long time. If you're not sure you'd reach for something regularly or hold onto it for years, we'd rather you didn't buy it. If the answer's yes, we'd love to be part of your wardrobe. Every piece we make is meant to collect character with you.