Sourcing in Paris: How We Actually Buy

We don't design a range and then have it made — we go to Paris and buy what already exists. Established wholesale showrooms across the city hold rails of ready-made stock, and our job is to go through them in person, try pieces on, and decide what's actually good enough to bring home. It's a slower, less certain way to build a collection than sitting in London and ordering from a catalogue, but it means every single piece has been handled and argued over before it ever reached the site.

This is a genuinely different way of building a range to commissioning a production run. We're not sketching a jean and asking a factory to cut it to our own pattern — we're standing in a showroom, picking up a jean that's already been made, in a colour and a cut that's already on the rail, and deciding it's right. The advantage is honesty: what you see on the site is what we actually held in our hands, not a render, and not a sample that might change by the time it reaches production.

That's also why what we bring home is so small — eight units, eighteen units, sometimes two of a single colour — because the showroom only has what's on the rail that day and we don't get to ask for more once it's gone. The Parachute Trouser came home eight units at a time, in each of its two colourways. The Fawn Jacket arrived eighteen units strong. The Lounge Set, our smallest edit yet, came to just eight in total, split two apiece across four colours — the real reason it sells out fastest of anything in the range, not a manufactured scarcity story.

In practice that means going in with a list rather than a mood board — a gap in trousers, a want for something in stripe, a note that the last shirt sold through before autumn even started. We go from showroom to showroom against that list, because our job on the day is recognising a piece that's already right, not describing one that doesn't exist yet.

It's a slower way to build a range than ordering from a catalogue back in London, and a more expensive one per unit — small quantities never come cheap. But it's the only way we know to stand behind a piece before it's even landed, because we chose it in the room, not from a photograph. That's what "Sourced in Paris. Sent from London." actually means in practice — not a claim about where the cloth comes from, but a description of how the buying gets done, one showroom and one rail at a time.