Knitted in Tuscany
How we make it
We didn't start doing this on a particular date, with a plan and an announcement. In Prato nothing has ever been thrown away: since the postwar years, yarn here has been spun back out of rags — and anyone who grew up in this town takes that for granted.
What you'll read below isn't a campaign. It's how this city works, and it was in the company before we were. And it's what we do now, not what we intend to do.
We make little and reorder often
Our pieces are 100% Made in Italy, and making them close to home isn't only a question of quality: it means we can look at a piece closely while it's being made, and keep working with the same people for years.
We make small runs and reorder often. No full warehouse, no whole collections left on our hands. For us that means less raw material wasted; for you it means a piece knitted recently and a price that doesn't swing: we do run discounts, but never past 20%, because we have no mountain of unsold stock to clear at half price.
Everything within a few miles
Some of the yarn doesn't even have to travel: it's already here. We buy from several spinning mills in Prato — that's the case for the cotton, the blends and the recycled yarn. The rest arrives, and from that point on it goes nowhere: knitted, hand-linked, finished, pressed — all in house or by workshops inside the Tuscan textile district. Even the washing, the one stage we don't do ourselves, goes to a laundry a few miles away.
It isn't a slogan about transport. It's that a piece doesn't circle the world three times before it's finished. And if something isn't right we can go and look at it in person the same morning, instead of writing an email and waiting.
Virgin cashmere is the exception, and we'd rather say so ourselves: the raw fiber comes from the high plateaus of Asia, like all the cashmere in the world. What's Italian is the piece.
The nearly empty cones
When a cone of yarn runs down there's always a little left at the bottom: too little to make a piece from, too much to be nothing. Throwing it out would be the easy thing.
Instead it's where our striped scarves come from. Each stripe takes very little yarn, and a multi-stripe scarf is built by putting together the ends of different cones. It isn't a clever idea: it's the way Prato has always worked, and it's the most concrete thing we do to keep from wasting yarn.
Washing instructions in every package
In every box we ship, along with the piece, there's a printed card with all the steps on it. It isn't the small print on the back of a label: it's the part of the purchase that decides how long what you've bought will last.
Lukewarm water and very little wool detergent, or a few drops of baby shampoo. One piece at a time, inside out. Press gently — don't wring it, don't rub it. Never soak it more than five minutes. Rinse patiently, and keep the water at the same temperature throughout.
Washing is what makes it last
A piece you keep wearing is worth more than any material we could choose — and what decides whether you keep it isn't the yarn, it's the wash.
Hand wash cold, or use the wool cycle. Press the water out, never wring. Dry flat, away from radiators and direct sun. Cared for this way, a cashmere sweater will last years. Washed hot or spun dry, it felts on the third wash, goes to the back of a drawer and then into a bag.
That's where fast fashion does the real damage: not in the piece it makes, but in the habit of treating a sweater as something that belongs to one season.
The box
The box we ship in is FSC certified: the board comes from responsibly managed forests. But the thing that matters most is its shape.
It takes up no more room than a mailer, and it's rigid. Rigid means the piece doesn't have to be folded, and arrives the way it left. The footprint of a mailer means far less volume than a die-cut box — and in shipping, volume is what really weighs, because a van fills up with space long before it fills up with pounds.
Shipping emissions
Every package that leaves here emits carbon. We can't bring that to zero, but we can pay for its removal.
We use Planet, the Shopify program that puts a share of every order toward companies that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it. That's a different thing from classic offsetting: there you fund a project so that carbon isn't emitted, here you take out carbon that's already there.
It doesn't solve the problem, and we don't tell it as though it did. It's what we can do right now, on every order.
100% Made in Italy
Yarn we select, knitted in our own factory in Prato. Our Factory