An Update On What We Are Up To

For those of you who follow our product lines, I thought I might tell you a little about what we are up to at the moment here at Le Noeud Papillon in Sydney.

WEBSITE

We will be reserving the website solely for men's accessories and have decided to withdraw product lines such as shirts because we have a hands-on approach and we believe that shirts should fit well, and the technology is not yet there to support this in an online world.

We will be adding new lines of products under a label called 'Accessories' over the coming months. We are currently investigating what kind of products we wish to develop and sell, suffice to say that they will be under our own label.

POCKET SQUARES

We recently decided to do our own line of screen printed silk pocket squares. The sunk costs of doing this is quite high. As opposed to digital printing, which can give more detailed prints and flexibility in design, screen printing or corrosive printing as we would preferably undertake, is very expensive and there are huge minimums required to get the ball rolling. This is possible for larger brands to do because they have volume and wider distribution channels, but as we are a small company, such adventures rely on strong sales in our other product lines before we can invest in new techniques. We will keep you posted when we are about to receive our first batch but it looks like they won't be ready until January 2012.

BOW TIES

We have been weaving our own silk designs for some time. Although some of our more basic patterns are catalogue silks that we search for from our silk merchants archives, we generally prefer to weave our own designs so that customers can't find our products anywhere else. The process is rather expensive. First we must  set up our own designs which takes some time and creativity, then when this process is complete the designs are sent to Italy to be translated. The process is costly not only because of the design process we undertake but there are also set up fees in Italy to begin the weaving process. This is the reason we add an additional price to our own limited edition designs, in order to recoup the additional costs in production. Furthermore, the time taken to complete these designs is longer as we have to wait until the correct warp is on the loom before we can proceed. Over the coming weeks we will have four more designs available. After this we will be halting designs of our own silks until the start of 2012.

TIES

A new range of six fold ties which we made in Como, Italy are arriving shortly. Some of the designs are for cocktail wear - such as Parisian Nights - whereas others are catered for city workers. We will be continuing to make ties but as an appendage to our bow tie line which we think defines us as a brand. Our aim, moving forward, is to create conservative business ties rather than cocktail ties, as we feel that there is a small, in fact, tiny gap in the saturated tie market which we think we might fill. However, our aim is not to become a tie maker as this is something we think is done well enough by other brands across the globe that we don't need to intrude.

SHIRTS

We continue to work with customers in the Sydney metropolitan area in creating customised or 'bespoke' shirts. The work is very laborious but extremely rewarding. Our focus is on bringing in fabrics directly from Italy which consumers would not ordinarily be able to acquire off the rack. Our patrons are MOSTLY very happy, however bespoke shirt making is a tricky business and not to be taken lightly. We spend a great deal of time working on correcting our patterns to ensure a very neat well-fitted shirt. In order to reduce some of the time taken, we have developed a made to measure service at the same time, for those customers who don't have the time nor patience for a bespoke service.

SUITS

We vowed never to enter the world of suits, precisely because of our experience with bespoke shirts. However, slowly we have gained the skills to work off a master block and every now and then we are doing a suit, though preferably we have been doing jackets alone. We have concentrated on doing dinner jackets - ones which have an added flair and can be worn with solid colour trousers such as traditional black or midnight blue. Our jackets are made using the finest wools we can source as well as jacquard silks which we have woven in Italy. For us, making a dinner jacket is far more creative and compelling than a suit and a chance for the client to express themselves in a very individual way. Just this week we have completed a midnight blue window pane check from the Holland and Sherry Black Tie Elite book. It was an exceptional jacket and one which I look forward to showing on the blog over the coming weeks.

Well, that is all our news. I hope I didn't bore you and please free to contact us with your questions any time you like. We love hearing from our customers!

Regards,
Nicholas.