Why Our Prices Are Rising

During the summer of 2021, we raised the prices on many of our clothing items.

The causes are well known: soaring energy prices and skyrocketing raw material costs (and for us in the textile industry, the increase has been particularly sharp for organic cotton).

Faced with this increase in costs, brands can adopt three strategies:

• Earning less money per item of clothing—or, to put it another way, “reducing our margin.” This might be an option if the margin were high, as it is for logo brands or luxury brands, but for us, it’s impossible: as we’ve explained here, our margin is already among the lowest on the market, and reducing it would jeopardize our business model.
• Producing lower-quality products: by cutting corners on the quality of our materials—for example, by opting for conventional cotton instead of organic cotton—or by moving production to low-cost countries. Of course, none of this is an option for us.
• Raising prices: Unfortunately, that's the only option left to us.

To limit these price increases, we're also trying to save money by cutting out the nonessentials. For example, removing the pocket from our Oxford shirt allows us to keep the price the same.

No one knows what the future holds: if production costs continue to rise, the prices of our clothing will have to follow suit. On the other hand, if prices return to “pre-COVID” levels, the prices of our clothing will also go down.