From a team of three to twenty, and all the work in between.
What looks like chaos is a kind of order. Each room keeps its own rhythm, and everyone knows which one is theirs. The three of us who started would not recognise the rooms. We would recognise the standard.
There is an assumption that a brand built on care is meant to stay contained, that scale and taste cannot share a room. I never believed it. The more we wanted to make, and make beautifully, the more hands it took to build work that deserved the name. And the more demanding the place we make it in, the truer that became.
Every person employed was a refusal to cut a corner.
We did not get from three people to twenty on a plan. We got there on three things: momentum, demand and growth. I will be honest about all three, because the tidy story, the one where I saw it all coming, is not the true one. What I had to learn was never how to feel them. It was how to tell them apart. There is growing because you can and growing because you must, and I rarely knew which one I was doing until I was already paying for it.
It started with me. Founder and head designer, and the cutter too, which is the one part I have never fully handed over. There is something about laying a pattern on cloth and committing to the first cut that I have always wanted to keep close. Beside me there was one tailor and one seamstress. That was the brand. Three of us, and everything we made passed through those three pairs of hands.
What came after arrived in the order the work demanded it. First a brand manager, so someone was thinking about the brand while I was thinking about the clothes. Then interns, and more tailors and seamstresses, because demand does not wait for you to feel ready. A production manager and an operations manager came next, the two roles that finally took the floor and the logistics out of my hands. Then customer service, because the people who buy this deserve more than a silent transaction. A new head designer and a junior designer, so the design no longer lived in one head, mine. Sales associates for the retail side. Human resources, once the team had grown large enough that looking after it was a job of its own. More tailors again, and an assistant. Each role was a part of the work I could no longer hold alone, handed to someone who could hold it better.
Then there is everything that happens before and after the sewing, which the clothes show least of all. A pre-order is a promise we make before the product exists, which means a calendar, a supply chain, and a hundred small decisions about who makes what, in which order, by when. Sampling days that run long. Market runs that come back with seventy things we needed and one we did not know we did. Holding all of it together is an operations team, the people who turn a sketch and a promise into something the studio can actually deliver, and a garment made in our production rooms into a parcel worn somewhere with an entirely different postcode. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a beautiful idea and an order that arrives.
There is also the matter of where I make. Production here is not the tidy version the word handmade tends to suggest. The power comes and goes, and a generator is not a footnote, it is diesel bought by the drum, an electricity bill that arrives whether the grid held that month or not, and the stretches of fuel scarcity when diesel is not a question of price but of whether you can get any at all. Some materials cross borders before they reach the cutting table, which means customs, waiting, and a currency that can move under your feet between the order and the invoice. Others I find on a market run and carry back by hand. Skill is not something you buy ready-made. You train it, you keep it, and you build a place worth staying in. None of that is a complaint. It is the cost of making something real in a city that does not hand you the easy version, and I would not make it anywhere else.
Demand is the easiest of the three to misread. A season that suddenly sells through can feel like a mandate, when sometimes it is only a season. The question I learned to ask was never "can we sell more." It was "can we make this as well at twenty as we did at three, and would another pair of hands raise the work or simply multiply it."
Growing, for me, has never meant growing for its own sake. A larger atelier is only worth it if the thing it produces is better, more considered, closer to the standard I set myself at the very beginning. When growth would cost me that, I have said no, and saying no has protected this brand more than any hire ever has.
So yes, on a busy day it can look chaotic. But underneath it is the most deliberate thing we have ever built. The thing people admire in the clothes is not a mood, and it was never an accident. It is a team, an operation, a place that makes you earn the result. None of it shows in the finished garment. The clothes only ever show what we wanted you to see.