Why We Made Our Own Hoodie

The hoodie shouldn't have been hard. We just wanted something we'd actually wear off the desk. Heavyweight. Real embroidery. A fit that didn't make you look like you'd shrunk in the wash.

Eleven months and six prototypes later, we have it. Here's what slowed us down.

Fabric was the easy part — 450gsm loopback cotton, French mill, 12-week lead time. The hard part was the pattern. The first three prototypes hung off the shoulders like a flag in calm weather. We hired a patternmaker who'd done two seasons at a luxury house. She rebuilt the block from scratch, twice.

Then embroidery. Printed logos crack. Screen-printed logos peel. We wanted the wordmark to last as long as the fabric, which meant embroidered — and to embroider clean on heavyweight loopback, you need a backing that doesn't pucker. Two factories failed at this before we found one that didn't.

Final cost per unit is roughly four times what the printed alternative would have been. We charge eighty-nine dollars for it. We could not have done it for less without giving something up that we weren't willing to give up.