How a Made-to-Order Knit Sweater Is Made

A made-to-order knit sweater is not a sweater pulled from a warehouse in your size. It does not exist until you order it. Your measurements become a pattern, the pattern is knitted by one person, and the garment that arrives fits the body it was drafted for — not an average of five thousand bodies.

This page explains exactly what happens between the moment you order and the moment a parcel reaches your door: the stages, the hours, the tolerances, and what we do when something goes wrong.

What "made to order" means here

Off-the-rack knitwear is knitted to a size chart, in bulk, in advance, then stored. Made-to-order knitwear is knitted after you order, to numbers you supply or confirm. The practical difference is not romance — it is three measurable things:

• No unsold stock. Nothing is discounted later because it did not sell. The price you pay reflects the yarn and the hours, not the cost of warehousing guesses.
• One knitter, start to finish. The person who casts on is the person who blocks, finishes and signs the hem.
• Six numbers, not a size band. There is no size to pick. Chest, body length and sleeve are required; waist, upper arm and across-shoulder are drafted from the block if you skip them, and the pattern fixes the shoulder, the sleeve and the ease for you.

What happens, stage by stage

1 · Style and yarn — day 0

You choose one of four pullover shapes — V-neck, hi-neck, polo or turtle-neck — or one of the two heavy brushed cashmere pieces (Chunky Brushed Cashmere Hi-Neck, Cable-Knit Brushed Pure Cashmere). Those six are the whole catalogue: there is no cardigan, no crew-neck pullover in the regular line, and no separate “oversized” product — every style is knitted to the same construction.

Then one of four yarns. The price updates live as you choose, because the yarn is the single biggest variable: organic cotton with wool sits at the entry point, 100% merino above it, merino with 30% cashmere above that, and Grade-A cashmere at the top of the pullover range, with the two brushed pieces above them all. The exact figure, in your own currency, is the one on the screen — the table below reads it live from the catalogue rather than from a price list that quietly goes stale.

2 · Color — day 0 to 1

Pick from the seasonal palette of twelve shades, or send a photograph of any color and we dye-match it. Every dye match is confirmed with you in writing before the yarn goes into the bath, because screens render color differently and plant-based dyes shift slightly.

3 · Measurements — day 1

Three ways to get the numbers: give us your height and weight and we draft chest, body length and sleeve from them; measure a sweater you already own, laid flat; or take the six body measurements with our step-by-step guide. Chest, body length and sleeve are required; waist, upper arm and across-shoulder are optional, and are drafted from the block when you leave them blank. The construction is fixed — set-in shoulder, a sleeve tapered to the cuff, the body length you state, and 3.5 in of ease over the chest — and the numbers are stored under a Fit ID.

A person confirms every figure with you before the yarn is cut. That confirmation is the step that prevents most fit failures, which is why we do not skip it.

4 · Knitted and finished — weeks 1 to 3

The 18 to 30 hours are the whole garment, not the machine running. Computerised flat-beds knit the panels; almost everything after that happens at a bench, by hand, by the finishers who work on this floor. If you have seen “18–30 hours” and pictured a machine running for a day and a half, this is the honest breakdown.

Stage	On the machine	At the bench
Pattern drafted from your Fit ID; test swatch knitted and measured	—	1.5–3.0 h
Yarn wound and checked against the shade card; machine set up; gauge confirmed	0.5–1.0 h	0.5 h
Panels knitted: front, back, two sleeves	4.5–9.0 h	0.5–1.0 h
Ribs knitted: hem, cuffs, neckband	0.5–1.5 h	0.5 h
Washed and blocked, attended throughout	0.5 h	1.0 h
Linked and seamed: shoulders, side seams, sleeves to body	—	4.0–5.5 h
Sleeve heads set in, neckband joined by hand	—	1.5–3.0 h
Trimmed and hand-finished; threads, seams and edges checked	—	1.0–1.5 h
Quality check, press, signature in the hem, packing	—	1.0–1.5 h
Photographs and messages to you along the way	—	0.5 h
Per sweater, machine time	6.0–12.0 h	—
Per sweater, bench time	—	10.5–15.0 h
Pattern work, once per new Fit ID	—	1.5–3.0 h
All in	18–30 hours, spread over two to three weeks.

Which end of the range you land on depends on the yarn, not on how busy we are. M1 merino and M4 cotton–wool run at 12 and 10 gauge and knit quickly; M3 Grade-A cashmere runs at 14 gauge, which means more passes per panel and more hand-finishing at the seams, so it sits at the top of every range. Then washing, blocking and a stage-by-stage inspection. You get photographs at the knitting, quality-check and packing stages, so the sweater is never a black box.

5 · Our own floor, and why we quote weeks instead of units

Knitting is not the constraint here. The panels run on our own computerised flat-beds, machine after machine, and a week of orders never waits on a needle bed. What sets the pace is the bench: linking the shoulders and side seams, setting sleeve heads by hand, joining the neckband, trimming, pressing and inspecting — 10.5 to 15 hours of it on every sweater, none of which can be automated without the seams showing it.

So we publish a lead time instead of a weekly output. Two to three weeks is what this floor can hold alongside the sampling and development work it does for other labels — more than forty of them, on these same machines. That work is also why the floor can absorb a busy week without a queue forming: development and production share the same machines, but not the same bench hours. When the bench is genuinely full we close the order book rather than extend the wait quietly, or move a piece to another bench and hope nobody notices the difference.

It is also why the Fit ID matters commercially. A returning customer arrives with the pattern already drafted, which removes 1.5 to 3 hours from the order — a real saving on a floor where hours are the cost.

6 · Delivery — 5 to 10 business days

Tracked express to the United States and Canada. Duties and import taxes are not prepaid — if customs charges anything on delivery, it is payable by the customer. Order to door is typically three to five weeks: two to three weeks on the machine and the bench, then five to ten business days in transit.

The tolerance we work to

Handwork is not machining. We work to plus or minus 2cm on body measurements, and we treat variation in stitch tension, texture and dye lot as inherent to natural fibers rather than as a defect. What we do treat as a defect: chest, sleeve or body length off by more than 2cm from the numbers we confirmed; a fit that differs from the agreed pattern; a color that does not match the confirmed swatch; or a fault in the knit, the finishing or the seams.

When the fit is wrong

We knit a new sweater to corrected measurements, free, within 30 days of delivery. The work is free; postage is not included — you cover sending the first one in, we cover sending the corrected one back, once per order. Not store credit. Not a discount code. One free re-knit per order, and if the second sweater still misses, we refund in full.

This promise replaces a standard return window rather than sitting alongside it. A sweater knitted to your measurements cannot be resold to anyone else, so a 30-day return window would be a promise we could not honour. A guaranteed fit for 30 days, corrected rather than refunded, is one we can.

Common questions

Do I need a fitting or a tailor?

No. Height and weight, or the flat measurements of a sweater you already own, are enough to start. A person confirms the numbers before production.

Can I cancel once I have ordered?

Yes, for a full refund, any time before the yarn is cut — normally the first 24 hours. After that the yarn has been dyed and the pattern drafted to you, so the order cannot be cancelled, but the Perfect Fit Promise still applies on delivery.

How is this different from made-to-measure tailoring?

The same principle applied to knitwear: a pattern drafted to your numbers, then constructed by one maker. The difference is the material — knitted fabric has more give than woven cloth, so tolerance matters more and a re-knit is the honest remedy rather than an alteration.

Will the color look like the photo?

We confirm the shade in writing before dyeing, and plant-based dyes vary slightly between batches. If the finished color does not match the swatch we confirmed with you, that counts as "not right" under the promise.

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