Jeans: quality BEATS quantity
best practice projects
Two marketing professionals decide one night to leave their agencies and sew eco-fair jeans instead. Their company philosophy: custommade rather than mass-produced. With their handmade trousers the Gebrüder Stitch have revolutionised one of the most consumptionoriented realms of fashion.
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he story is now well-known in Vienna: two young promoters meet for a beer and decide on the same evening to leave their agencies and make a new start with sustainably produced, custom-made jeans. “I think if I’d said back then that I wanted to take a watercolour class instead of a sewing class, people’s reactions would have been the same: man, you’re crazy!” says Moriz Piffl, one of the Gebrüder Stitch, the Stitch Brothers. He is sitting on a vintage sofa in their studio – the “trouser lab” near Vienna’s Mariahilfer Straße. A cool shop, stuffed to the brim with sewing machines, clothes racks, a coffee machine, cutting tables, and two budgies in a cage – the “Gebrüder Sittich” (“Sittich” being the German for parakeet). But let’s start from the beginning. Four years have gone by since the evening when Moriz Piffl and his colleague Michael Lanner gave birth to their jeans idea. At that point, they weren’t even the best of friends, but they did have a similar life story. Ten years’ experience in marketing, each with their own agency, and both had it up to here with it all. Their jeans, they decided, should be sustainable and produced entirely in Austria. The idea started a mini nationwide revolution and even found recognition abroad. The well-loved – but also criticised – mass product that is jeans was suddenly turned into a custom-made article. And what’s more, it’s produced organicly: no low-wage workers are exploited, and the environment isn’t polluted with toxic chemicals. The sewing machines are located in Vienna, as are the washing machines. The mechanical effects on the trousers are created with zip ties, sandpaper and tag
guns. To bleach the jeans, potassium permanganate and hypochlorite are used at the moment, but soon these substances will be replaced by a sustainable, alternative process that has been specially developed by a Viennese chemist. The fabrics are GOTS certified and transformed into jeans in the Stitch Brothers’ “trouser lab” in Vienna. That means that the value added also remains in Austria. Thinking back to the company’s beginnings, Piffl admits in all honesty that, “If we had known back then how complicated all this is, we wouldn’t have done it.” The way the pair tackled the preparation stage was almost naïve. Trying to learn everything there is to know about jeans in half a year, doing a sewing course, travelling to textile factories and yet, at the end of it all, they still didn’t know enough, they now confess. “There are several aspects, like product visualisation, timetabling, the customer database, that we didn’t even think about”, says Piffl. Well, the fashion industry is a tough business. This is why, according to Piffl, they still rely on funding. The support from aws Kreativwirtschaft was particularly significant: “Without the assistance that we were given right at the beginning, we simply wouldn’t exist – or at least not the way we do today”, he says. It took the pressure off when they were developing their business plan and defining the production and design processes for their jeans. Added to that, there was the headwind they had to face not only from their family and acquaintances, but also from the sector itself. No one was prepared to believe that custom-made eco-jeans could work,
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