Every sweater here exists because one small person would not wear a sweater that did not fit.
The name on the door
The brand is called Mochi Master, and it comes from one small person.
Mochi is the plain rice cake we eat at New Year: pale, a little chewy, nothing decorated on the outside. Master is what you call a four-year-old who has decided she is in charge. It began as a joke about a child with very firm opinions, and it stopped being a joke the first time the whole family said it without smiling.
When the workshop needed a name, there was only one candidate.
The sweater that started it
The problem was ordinary. Children's knitwear is cut for an average child, and she was not one. Sleeves hung past her hands, shoulders sat too wide, the hem rode up the moment she raised her arms. Every sweater was almost right, which is the most irritating kind of wrong.
So the first one was knitted from her own numbers — chest, length, sleeve — instead of a size printed on a label. Nothing clever about it. Just measurements that belonged to one person.
She wore it until the cuffs went thin. Then she asked for another one. Then a friend asked for one. That is still, more or less, how the order book fills up.
Why we knit one at a time
A sweater made to one person's measurements cannot be made in a batch, so we don't try. One order in front of each of them: 18 to 30 hours of work per sweater — 6 to 12 with a panel on the machine, 10.5 to 15 at the bench, 1.5 to 3 of pattern work for a new Fit ID — and a signature inside the hem when it is finished.
The floor is not one bench in a back room: computerised flat-beds, a linking bench, a sample room, and the same machines developing knitwear for more than forty other labels. So the limit is not machine hours — the panels come off the beds faster than anyone can finish them. It is the finishing: linking, setting sleeve heads by hand, pressing, inspecting. We take orders up to what the bench can finish properly, then close the book rather than promise a date we cannot hold.
It also means nothing is knitted before you ask for it. No stock, no warehouse, no end-of-season markdowns on sweaters nobody wanted.
What we ask of you
Two things, and only two.
Your numbers. Either a sweater you already love, measured flat, or your own body measurements. Five minutes with a tape measure, and a person checks every figure with you before we start knitting. There is no size to pick: chest, body length and sleeve are required, waist, upper arm and shoulder are optional, and one fixed construction sets the shoulder, the sleeve and the ease.
And a little patience. Two to three weeks is not a queue you are standing in — it is the thing itself. Yarn being chosen, a pattern being drawn, rows going onto the needles, the finished piece washed, blocked and inspected. By the time it reaches you, part of what keeps you warm in it is the waiting you already did.
If you want to see the making
We wrote down every stage, hour by hour, on how a made-to-order sweater is made. And if you would rather just tell us what you have in mind, write to us — a person answers, usually within a day.