Part 1: Boo-hoo

Back in 2016, Loom was just getting started and we wanted to create the shirt that wouldn’t have the problems of other shirts. And what people were telling us was that the number one reason they throw away a white shirt is stains. The solution seemed obvious. We had to make…

August 2017. BonneGueule, France’s go-to menswear website, publishes an article comparing shirts from different brands. Including our stain-proof shirt. And their verdict hurts:

In short, our shirt really wasn’t great. And on top of that, we had made claims that were completely false.

Maybe you’re tempted to give us the benefit of the doubt, and you’re thinking BonneGueule got it wrong, or was particularly harsh with us? That’s very kind of you, but we had to face the facts: every one of their criticisms was justified.

Part 2: Back to the drawing board

A new manufacturer

The first thing we did was write to our shirt manufacturer: what do you mean, our buttons aren’t mother-of-pearl? What do you mean, our seams don’t have 7 stitches per centimetre?

That’s when we realised these “failings” were partly our own fault: we hadn’t been clear enough in our written requests.

So we changed the way we work with our factories: from then on, we would send a very specific document spelling out every detail of the garments we produce, a “tech pack”, as it’s called in the trade. And of course we changed this shirt’s page on our site, removing every unjustified promise.

But we also realised we weren’t the only ones at fault: a few weeks later, that same manufacturer delivered a batch of shirts with measurement errors all over the place. We then found out that production had been subcontracted to another factory, one we didn’t know.

Trust was broken, so we decided to stop working with them and go looking for a new partner. Several people we trust pointed us to Supercorte.

How do you know whether a factory does good work?

• By looking at its client list: Supercorte mostly works with high-end, even luxury, brands.
• By talking to them: this time, we felt we were speaking the same language when it came to quality.
• By looking at what they produce: every prototype they made for us was flawless.
• By looking at their prices: the shirts cost us a little more than before. Which makes sense: quality has a price.

Quality control

For a long time, we only checked the prototypes, not the garments coming out of our big production runs. Yet when you care about how long clothes last, sticking to the size chart, for instance, matters as much as the strength of a fabric: if a shirt is 2 cm too narrow at the shoulders, it’s unwearable. So we put a whole series of things in place to minimise the risk of “non-conformity”: tests, measurement checks… and hiring someone dedicated to exactly this.

No longer a public health hazard

Of all the hard-to-read criticisms in the article, the most worrying was the one about the fabric:

All of this suggests that this “stain-proof” fabric contained some pretty nasty chemical additives. To be fair, the fabric did comply with REACH, the EU chemicals regulation that any product made or sold in the European Union has to meet (a rule not everyone follows, Shein in particular, as this documentary showed).

But to be absolutely sure a fabric is harmless, we should have asked for the “OEKO-TEX” standard, which we now require for every one of our fabrics.

Digging into the subject, we realised that it’s best to avoid any treatment meant to give fabrics “superpowers”: they are often based on rather unpleasant chemical compounds, such as “PFCs”, which can contaminate the environment for centuries and whose effects on human health are still uncertain (the infamous endocrine disruptors…).

So we decided to stop producing this stain-proof shirt. And then we banned every treatment of this kind: “easy-iron” finishes on our shirts, “anti-odour” properties on our socks, “quick-dry” finishes on our swim shorts fabric… Is it worth risking your health to save three minutes of ironing?

Textile know-how

This BonneGueule article, along with feedback from our customers, shattered one of our beliefs: to make quality clothes, you cannot put blind trust in factories.

Factory workers do very hard and very valuable work, but they are far from knowing everything. In particular, unlike brands, they don’t necessarily know how clothes age. At Loom, we always ask our customers what they think of our clothes one year after buying them. So we know every potential weak point, and we often know better than the factories what to watch out for. On a t-shirt, for example, experience has taught us to pay very close attention to loss of shape. And if it’s a dark colour, we know we need to watch colour fastness, because sun and sweat can fade it.

In short, if we really want to improve the quality of our clothes, we have to understand the science behind garment quality: the technical expertise has to be on our side too.

And that’s what we work on every day now: reading studies and books, talking to the technical directors of factories and the quality managers of other brands, running our own tests…

Today, every time we learn something about garment quality, we try to cross-check our sources and not just cherry-pick the figures or facts that suit us. So much so that it has become one of our communication principles:

With this new way of working, we went back over everything we took for granted about shirts, point by point (“is it true that this detail makes it stronger?”). And that led us to make quite a few changes.

First, we decided not to use mother-of-pearl buttons: it’s true that the material is beautiful (which is why you find it on high-end shirts), but we found that these buttons can break in the washing machine. So we went for thick resin buttons that stand up better to washing. And we always reinforce how they are attached, using an Ascolite machine that wraps an extra heat-sealed thread around the shank of the button (see the machine in action here).

Next, we looked at side gussets (known in French as “hirondelles”, or swallows), those little triangles of fabric where the front and back of the shirt meet, which are supposed to make it stronger. We took a fast-fashion shirt with no gussets and pulled on each side as hard as we could: nothing gave. Another purely decorative detail rather than a real reinforcement, so we decided to drop them.

Finally, we gave up French seams and 7 stitches per cm: at one time these may well have improved durability, but today the most commonly used sewing threads (“polycotton”) are particularly strong, which makes this kind of detail superfluous. That doesn’t mean shirts with these seams are bad, just that they are an aesthetic choice, not a matter of strength.

Part 3: Redemption

At first, as you can imagine, reading that BonneGueule article knocked us back a bit.

But the article also did us good (that’s our masochistic side): it was one of the wake-up calls we needed to radically change the way we develop clothes. Stop working with unreliable factories, check the quality of our production runs more closely, question what everyone takes for granted, build up our textile knowledge… and finally, stop “over-promising”.

Because it’s normal not to manage to make flawless products. What we want to avoid is claiming that they are. And at the time, the superlatives we used for our products were pretentious… and false.

In fact, we were suffering from what the French blog Bon Pote calls “jaitoutcomprisme”, the I’ve-got-it-all-figured-out syndrome: when you first get interested in a field (garment quality, in our case), you often fall victim to overconfidence bias.

In our case, after a 2-hour chat with a factory director and 2 articles on cotton fibre length, we thought we had cracked the recipe for long-lasting clothes. Except that textile quality is an extremely complex subject, and we will never have it all figured out, even after a lifetime devoted to it.

Back then, we promised “the best clothes on the market” and it worked: most people want to believe it, and it sold. But in the long run, we understood that it created a lot of disappointment: there is bound to be a t-shirt in your wardrobe that holds up as well as your Loom t-shirt, or even better.

So we gave up “over-promising”: these days, we try to be more measured and factual when we talk up our products. We even wrote this principle into our “editorial bible”:

And in the end, this ambition to make the best products on the market and to dominate no longer matches what we would like for the textile industry: we believe it needs an ecosystem of thousands of different small and medium-sized brands rather than a handful of multinationals lording it over the rest, as we wrote at the end of our article Coal in the cotton:

"Today, a handful of giant global brands are smothering everyone else with the race to the lowest price, and standardising the way the whole world dresses. Tomorrow, they could make way for thousands of brands that are more local, more thoughtful, more creative, and that create less misery and inequality.

Today, we spend our Saturday afternoons buying ever more clothes when our wardrobes are already overflowing, in shopping streets lined with the same shops over and over again, whether we are in Saint-Malo, Brive, Paris or Nancy. Tomorrow, we could rediscover the pleasure of buying thoughtfully. Of wearing clothes that are more beautiful and more durable. Of sewing a button back on (or having it done) instead of throwing away a shirt. Of discovering a shop we would never have seen anywhere else."

Almost 5 years have passed since that BonneGueule article was published. We have overhauled the way we make our shirts from top to bottom, and we think the work has paid off:

Today, we are rather proud of the Loom shirts we sell: they are sturdy, nicely cut, made locally, affordably priced, and our customers are happy with them.

But maybe in 2 years’ time, with all the textile knowledge we will have gathered, the new feedback from our customers and the latest innovations in the textile industry, we will reread this article and think we still knew nothing and were terribly naive.