slow fashion

what slow fashion means to us

slow fashion is a term we use because the things we make take time.

at nettle, we are not trying to churn out giant collections or make piles of clothing just in the hopes we sell it all and make more money. we often design in the moment, based on what our customers are asking for, what we are excited about, what people are actually wearing, and honestly, what i want to wear too.

i don't design for "trends" exactly, because that seems short sighted. but i love fashion and i love getting dressed. some of what we make might feel current, but i still want it to feel like something you can keep wearing long after the trend has passed. we keep our production numbers tight, we do not do sales very often, and we try to make fewer things more thoughtfully. to us, that is a big part of slow fashion: less waste, more intention, and a little more feeling behind the clothes.

slow fashion philosophy

real people doing real things.

we're a very small team, so slow fashion at nettle looks like real people doing a lot of real things. it looks like sourcing fabric late at night after a full day at the studio, cutting samples, fitting pieces, talking through colors, updating the website, packing orders, answering emails, ironing clothes, making content, driving to the dye house, doing quality control while we watch our comfort show on the studio tv for the 12th time, and moving the same rack of samples around the studio twelve times in one day.

SLOW FASHION PHILOSOPHY

we're not a machine.

nettle is not some giant machine. we're a small group of people making decisions as thoughtfully as we can, and sometimes that means things take longer. a restock is not just a button we press. a new style is not something we magically send into the world overnight. everything has to move through our actual hands, our actual schedules, and our actual teeny-tiny team. we have a hand in everything that happens at nettle. i drive to the factory a few times a week to answer questions, check on production, and drop off fabric. my honda element has been put through it, she sees everything first. ;) we do all the dye house trips ourselves, unless my car has had enough of me, which has happened a lot lately.

SLOW FASHION PHILOSOPHY

scrappy, chaotic, nettle.

we do all of our own photography and editing ourselves in the studio. the same people who pick the fabric, fit the samples, and pack the orders are often the same ones steaming the clothes, adjusting the weird little wrinkle that will not behave, taking the listing photos, editing the images, and uploading everything to the website. it's all very hands-on, very scrappy, and very nettle. we care about all of it because we know how much work went into getting each piece here in the first place. we pack every single order in house and touch every piece of clothing we make at least five times before you receive it. sometimes more. probably more. which is not great for margins, but it’s not all about that anyways. that's part of what makes us special. there's a lot of care in the process, even when the process is a little chaotic and covered in thread.