Monday, 5 October 2015

Interview Archives No. 3: Good Measure

The third of our interview archive posts is from our chat we had with sweatshirt specialists Good Measure. We are big fans of the brand, who create high quality sweats and also tees, in England. They are now stocked in a number of shops in the UK and worldwide, including Japan. Below are words from our chat with the chaps from Good Measure:

Firstly, when and why was the decision taken to start Good Measure?

The idea of doing something together had been kicking around for years, eventually we decided it was time to act. We then spent 18 months or more taking the steps to create something we where proud of. Travelling to mills and factories until we found people who we could trust to develop and manufacture a quality product.

When was your first sweatshirt produced?

We made various samples during the development process, but our first batch of production was Nov 2013.

Your sweats are stocked in some ace shops such as Oi Polloi and Peggs and Son, how did this come about? Are there plans for more stockists?

We know Nigel and Steve so once we where happy with the product we where able to get it in front of them and they believed we’d managed to make a sweatshit in the UK that was good enough to sit along side the more established brands they stock. The other stockists we have come through contacts and connections and we are really proud to be working with some great retailers. We work differently than most brands we make small batches of high quality sweatshirts on a regular basis rather than collections and seasons, this limits the number of stockist we can have both from a volume point of view and that retailers need to understand how we work and buy into that philosophy. Ultimately it would be good to have maybe a dozen UK stockists and some international, but we want to keep things tight so we can control quality and have a degree of exclusivity to keep it special.

Your collab with 6876 was extremely popular - how did this partnership happen?

We met Kenneth a while back and told him about our plans, once we we had the original M-21 we shared that with him and he shared an original 6876 sweatshirt. We decided to combine elements of both garments and the M-68 was the result it was really well received and sold out pretty quickly.

Can you explain about the production of each sweat?

To produce the sweats we work with the knitter to select yarn and construction for the type of fabric we want then the weight we want, typically our sweats are heavy weight. Our first batch of “Shirley Crabtree” is 470 GSM. Once we are happy we commission the production of the fabric and rib. We then work with our factory to produce the garments using our patterns and specifications.

From initial design to finished garment - roughly how long does this take?

It took over a year to get the M-21 right, making samples amending the fit re sampling tweaking details, once we where happy I would say it takes roughly 8/12 weeks to produce a new version of and existing style. To develop a new style from scratch is significantly longer.






No comments:

Post a Comment