We are a San Francisco-based men's fashion line who are proud of our quality, fit, service, and our ability to manufacture locally, openly, and at human scale.
Our mission is to make garments that last, that allow people a deeper creative relationship with what they wear, and that strengthen the communities in which they're worn.
Our philosophy is based on 3 principles.
Longevity. It is preferable to design clothing and companies for the long term.
Practice. Wisdom is achieved not through products, but through process.
Patience. Long-term success comes from measured growth and attention to community.
We aim to build clothing that people don't throw away, by focusing on quality of construction, fit, and service.
Construction. As designers, we hate it when people throw away clothes, so we go to great lengths to make clothing that lasts. Distilled garments are sewn using felled seams, bindings, and single needle construction that make for stronger, cleaner, pieces. We use high-quality fabrics, and we take special effort that our clothing is timeless rather than trend-based. And we believe so strongly in the quality of the product that we offer free garment repair for life on every one of our garments.
Fit. We believe that clothing looks best when it fits well, and we take a scientific approach to fit. We've noticed that most fashion lines choose either a mass-market fit, which is almost always baggy because it is designed to work for the largest common denominator, or a fashion fit, which works very well for the heroin-chic 17-year-old magazine models whose images sell the clothes. But we've found through exhaustive surveys of body shapes that most people fall in between these two categories, and we've spent a lot of time engineering our garments around this intuition: our tops have average neck and cuff sizes and sleeve lengths, but the bodies trend slimmer than mainstream lines, and shorter so that you can wear your shirts both tucked in or untucked. And since we want our customers to be 100% pleased with our fit, we offer tailored adjustments on any garment bought online and a very generous return policy.
We aim to offer the best service of any fashion line around. To that end, we offer...
Free 3-day Shipping (but if you need it sooner let us know and we will make it happen)
Free Shipping on Returns or Exchanges
Free Garment Repairs for Life
Free Personal Shopping
Free Custom Fittings
If you have any questions on these, call us any time at 415.558.8395, or send us an e-mail at customerservice@distilledclothing.com (or you can e-mail Matty or Sep directly), and if we're not in the office when you call or e-mail, we promise to respond within one day.
Open Design. We work hard on our designs, and we want to share them with other creative people. So we make the patterns for all of our garments available for free on our website, under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license. We also keep an open record of the daily inner workings of Distilled. Like the open-source movement in software, we believe that this will help to foster a culture of creativity, collaboration, and independent production.
Local Manufacturing. With most fashion lines, the average garment will travel several thousand miles before it gets to you. The cotton may be grown in Uzbekistan, milled in India, cut and sewn in China, warehoused in Los Angeles, and sold in London. We don't think this is healthy. We believe that it contributes to climate change, fosters our world's dependence on oil, weakens local communities, increases the prevalence of unacceptable labor practices, and diminshes our appreciation for the craft of making clothing.
We manufacture our garments close to where they are sold. All of our clothing is made in San Francisco's Mission District, 2 blocks from our office. Our goal is to manufacture every Distilled product from "seed to store" within 500 miles of where it is sold by 2010.
Agile Manufacturing We believe that the traditional seasonal sales cycle is bad for fashion; coming out with new product only every 3-6 months slows innovation and requires manufacturing to happen at large scales. We come out with new product at least every month. This allows us to make something as soon as we have an idea, and to iterate on old patterns frequently until we get them perfect. And it allows us to make our clothing in limited edition runs of 300 while still staying viable as a business.
The company as a member of the community. We believe our responsibility lies not only to our shareholders, but also to our employees, their families, our customers, the communities in which we operate, and the environment. To that end, we strive to provide above-market wages, decision-making ability, self-determination, and ownership to all of our employees, invest 50% of our profits into local community development, and use organic or transitional fabrics wherever possible.
Small is Beautiful. We believe in human-scale economics (and we thank E.F. Shumacher for the inspiration). All of our garments are made in limited quantities (of 300 or less); our staff is 3 people; we spend no money on PR and no money on magazine ads; and we limit our retail to a small number retail stores who understand what we are trying to achieve with our brand. We believe that doing things on a small scale allows us to innovate more quickly, take better care of our customers, and maintain a unique feel to our clothing.
