Learn about
Our Production
Our shirts embark on quite a journey —passing through many skilled hands before finally becoming part of your wardrobe. We know the people, companies and places behind each piece and are excited to share their stories with you. Come along as we explore our supply chain together.
Manufacturing
A tour to our suppliers in Portugal
Shirt Manufacturing
Our ready-to-wear shirts are made in Portugal. We work with specialised partners that have decades of experience in manufacturing men's shirts. They cut, measure and trim our fabrics and tailor our shirts under the highest quality standards. They check, iron, pack your shirts and make them ready for the shippment.
Our shirt manufacturing partners are based in the North of Portugal near Porto. Both are family run and employ around 70 employees each. As it is with many of our suppliers, most of these employees are women.
Our tailor-made shirts and the dress shirts for the Swiss market are made by a shirt-maker in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The company is based in Maglaj and is specialised in manufacturing high-quality dress shirts. The company was founded in 2005 and employs 220 people. It is certified according to the SA8000 social standard.
Weaving
A tour to our suppliers in Portugal
Fabrics
We source our fabrics from the most renowned European weaving mills for shirt fabrics. Our organic cotton fabrics are GOTS certified. No toxic chemicals are applied when dyeing and finishing the fabrics. Amongst others, no formaldehyds are used. Our linen fabrics are made under GOTS or Oeko-Tex standard.
Our main dying and weaving partners are based in the North of Portugal, not far from where our shirts are manufactured. The mills hold long traditions in fabric weaving and employ more than 500 people each. These companies dye yarns, weave and finish our exquisite fabrics according to our specifications and our designs.
Denim and corduroy fabrics require special partners. We source our denim fabrics from a prestigious weaving mill in the North of Italy. Our heavy corduroy fabrics are made by a German weaving mill.
Yarn production
We advise our weaving mills which kind of yarns to use for our fabrics. They buy these yarns from various spinning mills on the market.
For parts of our shirts we use organic cotton yarns that are made from cotton cultivated by small scale farmers of the Remei projects in Tansania and India. This allows us to trace back the origin of our shirts to the cotton fields. For example, we use bioRe® sustainable cotton for our Populus and Castanio shirts.
Other parts of our organic cotton yarns are traded or spun by a Portuguese spinning mill near Porto or by Turkish spinning mills. The majority of our linen yarns we use are made from European flax that are also spun in Europe.
Spinning
A tour to our suppliers in Portugal
Raw Materials
Large parts of our cotton shirts are made from organic cotton that was grown in the bioRe® projects in Tanzania and India. The use of these cotton sources offers us full traceability of our cotton shirts. bioRe® India and bioRe® Tanzania are organisations founded by the Swiss yarn trader Remei AG based in Rotkreuz. Both organisations buy organic cotton from 4'000 (India) and 2'000 (Tanzania) small-scale farmers.
The bioRe® organisations teach farmers in the cultivation of organic cotton, provide them with GMO-free cotton seeds, guarantee the purchase of their harvest and provide them with a 15% premium (based on average 5 years market price). The cotton sourced from these organisations are cultivated, picked and ginned according to the GOTS standard. You find organic cotton grown by bioRe® farmers in our Populus, Castanio, Ursido, Quercus flannel shirts, our Lynx shirts, Bernina shirts and many of our dress shirts.
In other cases our organic cotton is grown in Turkey. Unless the cotton is sourced from the bioRe® organisations, it is still hard to receive information on the exact origins of the raw materials used to spin the yarns for our fabrics. We are working on this and try to push our suppliers to be more transparent.
