Before we could start designing clothes, we were circling around one idea: build solid foundations and everything on top of them has a fighting chance. If we did a dodgy job no amount of nice fabric or savvy branding was going to save us.
There are endless styles of garment we eventually want to create. But with foundations in mind, we had to limit ourselves and begin at the core parts of a wardrobe. We studied the pieces in our own wardrobes that never really went out of rotation; the same shirt we’d reach for on an average Tuesday and without hesitation before a first date, the pairs of jeans that seemed to somehow keep getting better the more they got worn. So we started to sculpt our immediate goal around the idea of making a collection of staples for maximum utility and longevity.
That's the brief we set ourselves: the pieces people want to wear everyday and for every occasion. Pretty simple on paper, but what really urges you to grab the same shirt to go the office in, to wear on a date, and to sit around your house doing absolutely fucking nothing in? How do we construct our garments so they earn the chance to build character and age with you?
Having a starting point and actually making something, we quickly learned, are two very different problems.
On paper, a good jean or a great shirt sounds almost insultingly simple, they're the staples…How hard could it be? In reality, making a pair of jeans is relatively easy. But trying to make the perfect pair of jeans will probably send you broke or crazy. Our ambition for what these garments could be was well ahead of our technical ability to deliver it, and admitting that took swallowing a fair amount of ego.
So, we went looking for someone who had years of experience making what we couldn’t yet.
We went looking for the pattern maker.
For anyone who's never thought about it before: a pattern is the blueprint of a garment. It’s not a drawing of what it should look like or a 3D render on a computer, but the precise geometry that makes construction possible at all. Every garment starts as a two-dimensional idea that through stitching becomes something that you can wear. A pattern is what closes that gap: a set of flat pieces cut from paper or card, each one accounting for seam allowance, grain direction, and the exact curve needed to turn flat cloth into something more fashionable. Even minor adjustments of a few millimetres to any of the pieces can change the way the garment works, making a collar now not sit flat or a sleeve pull too quickly.
It's easy to underestimate how much of a garment's character comes from the pattern rather than the fabric. Two shirts cut from identical cloth will fit and move in completely different ways depending on the pattern behind them, long before you even factor in grading. Grading is the process of scaling a single pattern up and down across a full size range without losing the proportions that made it work in the first place. None of this is visible in a finished garment. You never see a pattern once a piece is sewn. But every decision made on that flat piece of card is the reason a garment either disappears onto your body or fights you all day.
A pattern maker is the person responsible for all of it. They’re the translator decoding your sketch into panels that someone can cut and make to be worn. Pattern makers are the architects of the garment, relying on their technical experience and theoretical knowledge to translate the designer's ideas and provide solid building plans for the tailors.
What followed was a string of late-nights down the Hume to Melbourne to meet with the pattern maker and an even longer thread of Zoom calls, watching our first toiles come to life. Toiles are rough mock-ups, loosely stitched together in cheap calico, that exist purely to test fit and proportion before anyone touches the real fabric. Toiles give you the ability to make on-body revisions that can be transferred back to the pattern before the sampling process even begins, cutting down the amount of waste.
Slowly, we could feel the collection moving in the right direction, and yet we hadn't even looked at fabric. Developing the fit and design language, with people who'd spent decades doing exactly that, mattered more to us than any t-shirt graphic ever could.
Building a real relationship with a pattern maker seems to be the part most brands skip these days. Plenty of creators online will show you that you can email a tech pack overseas and get a sample back, and they're right, you can. A tech pack is essentially an instruction manual for a manufacturer: measurements, construction notes, fabric specs, everything a stranger who has never seen your design needs before they have a crack making it. It does work. But it’s also quietly full of problems nobody likes to talk about.
When you give a manufacturer a tech pack they then have to build a pattern from that, they own that pattern, not you. Try to change manufacturers later and you're essentially starting from zero, hoping the new factory can reverse-engineer what the last one built. Without understanding how your own pattern and garment actually come together, you're left with no way to diagnose production problems when they inevitably show up. And that leads to the least glamorous problem of all: cost and waste. Relying entirely on someone else's interpretation of your tech pack generally means a longer sampling process, and every sample costs money, time, and freight. This on top of the physical waste with every sample you're not happy with.
None of this means the tech-pack route is wrong. Plenty of people do it brilliantly, pairing real technical knowledge with a strong manufacturer relationship, and a lot of established brands have in-house pattern makers and sample teams for exactly that reason. We just wanted to understand our own garments on a deeper level than an email chain would allow.
What actually frustrates us about the tech-pack economy is less the method and more the marketing around it: price always trumps quality, hardly anyone ever asks the hard questions, and the whole thing gets sold to consumers as "elevated basics" when it's really just fast-fashion operating on a smaller, better-lit scale. 5 samples industry standard
If you've read this far, you've probably already worked out why we spent so long talking about foundations before we let ourselves design a single garment.
