Kemi Adeyemi
Founder · Patterns
Cuts every first sample by hand. Owns the kitchen table the whole thing started on; it's now the cutting table.
It started with
40 tees and
a kitchen table
In 2019 we bought a second-hand screen press off a man in Deptford who swore it worked. It didn't, not at first. We pulled forty tees on Kemi's kitchen table, ruined eleven of them, and sold the other twenty-nine to people we knew from the same three clubs.
That should have been the end of it. Instead a stockist in Shoreditch asked what else we had, and the honest answer — nothing, we made forty and that's all there is — turned out to be the entire business.
People didn't want another brand with a permanent catalogue. They wanted the thing that would be gone.
Deadstock, or
we don't cut it
Every metre of fabric we've ever used was already sitting in a warehouse when we found it. Mill ends, cancelled orders, rolls a bigger label decided they didn't want after all. It's cheaper, it's better, and it means we physically cannot make the same garment twice — when the roll is finished, the style is finished.
The constraint isn't a marketing position. It's just what happens when you buy the fabric nobody else wanted.
Every piece carries a stamped run number inside the hem. Not a batch code — an actual number, out of an actual total. You know exactly how many exist. Usually it's fewer than you'd like.
