Week Five - Your shirt is finished and on the way! 

Week Four - Your shirt being sewn.

Week Three - Sewing preparations.

Now that every piece of your jacket has been cut, all those individual pieces need to be prepared before they get sewn together into your shirt. 

Preparations include folding, pressing, pointing the cuffs and collars, marking out where the pockets will be located, and sewing on all labels to name just a few. And don't worry, all the pen marks that are made on the jackets at this stage come out in the wash! They're just there to help to make sure every part is accurately sewn.

Side note - The pressing/ironing doesn't get much of the lime light in factories, but it's such an important stage of preparation. It's easy to be heavy handed with the iron and stretch or change the shape of something like a pocket band. If not done right it can change the fit and details of the jacket. It requires a lot of care and attention so that when everything comes together, it fits and looks just as it's designed to.

To see some of that prep work being done in the factory, check out the video above.

Week One - Cutting Your Shirt.

In mid July, each piece that makes up your shirt was cut.

Cutting sounds straight forward, but actually the process is a complex one.

First, Sandra (the head of pattern making and grading) creates the cut plan. That means working out how to lay out each pattern piece before cutting begins, to be left with as little waste as possible.

Sandra works out the cut plan on her computer, laying out each piece for every size separately. It’s important that every piece of your shirt is cut from the same roll of fabric, so that they react in the exact same way when they're washed.

Next the cut plan is printed to scale and laid over multiple layers of chambray, stacked neatly on top of each other.

And then cutting begins. One piece at a time.

Our factory used to use an electronic cutting knife that could cut through 50 layers of fabric at a time, but during the pandemic they invested in a new robotic cutting machine which is more accurate than the human hand and means all the skilled roles within the factory are based on constructing the shirts themselves.