Since 2019
One screen,
one squeegee
We are a two-person label that prints its own clothes. This page is the whole operation, including the parts that are less romantic than the name suggests.
Where it started
In 2019 a distributor passed on a run of heavyweight blanks and a friend of ours ended up with 200 of them in a garage in Porto. We borrowed a press, printed forty in a night, and sold them at a market that weekend for enough to print the next eighty.
That is not a founding myth, it is just what happened, and it set the model we still use: print what you can sell, sell what you can print, never order stock you have not already found a home for.
Seven years later the numbers are bigger and the model has not changed. Every drop is capped at 120 pieces per style because that is what two people can pull, cure, wash-test and pack in a working week.
How a drop gets made
Five steps, in order
01
Draw
Artwork gets built in two flat colours from the start. No gradients, no photographs — if it needs more than two plates it is not an OB graphic.
02
Burn
Each colour becomes a screen. Emulsion goes on the mesh, the film positive goes on top, and a UV bank hardens everything the artwork does not block.
03
Register
The two screens get lined up over the platen by eye against a test pull. This is the step everyone else automates and the reason our prints do not match each other.
04
Pull
Blue first, pink second, one squeegee stroke each. A good printer does about 120 pieces in a session before their arm starts drifting.
05
Cure
Through the dryer at 160°C to bond the plastisol, then a wash test on one piece from every lot before the rest go in boxes.
Step 03 is why no two pieces match. It is also the step we get the most emails about.
Who makes it
Cutting and sewing happen at two family-run factories in northern Portugal that we have worked with since 2021. We visit twice a year, we know the people on the line by name, and we pay on 14-day terms rather than the 90 that is standard in this industry.
Denim comes from a shuttle-loom mill in Okayama, Japan. Blanks are 320gsm ring-spun cotton from a Portuguese knitter forty minutes from the cut-and-sew. Printing, curing, wash-testing and packing all happen in our own studio.
We are not certified anything. We just have short supply chains and phone numbers for everyone in them.
- People
- 2 full time, 3 on drop weeks
- Cut & sew
- Northern Portugal
- Denim mill
- Okayama, Japan
- Payment terms
- 14 days
Drop 05 goes up in eleven days
One email the morning it lands, one when it's gone. Nothing in between.
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