Why we started.

I was twenty-three and I owned exactly one good shirt. I wore it to every interview, every first meeting, every dinner that mattered. I had saved three months for it, and for a while it did the one thing I needed it to do — it made me feel like I belonged in the room.

Four months later the collar had gone soft and the shoulders had begun to droop. I remember standing at a mirror before something important, pulling at the fabric, trying to make it sit the way it had in the shop. It would not. I went anyway, and I spent the whole evening thinking about my own shoulders instead of the conversation in front of me.

That sounds like a small thing to build a company on. It is not a small thing. When you are young and trying to be taken seriously, what you are wearing is either quietly on your side or quietly working against you.

I was writing software then. In that work you are not allowed to simply admire a problem — you open it up and find out what is actually wrong. So I did. I read about yarn and knitting and dyeing until the words stopped sounding foreign. I called mills who assumed I was wasting their time, and kept calling until one of them took the question seriously.

What I found surprised me. This country already makes some of the finest clothing in the world. I just could not buy it here. It is made for other people, shipped elsewhere, and what stays behind is mostly built to last a season and priced as though it should last longer.

ALTIOR came out of refusing to accept that. It took eleven months longer than I told my family it would. There were stretches where it was me, a spreadsheet, and a mill that had stopped picking up the phone. My mother asked more than once whether I was certain about this.

We launched with a single piece, and I am in no hurry to add a second. I would rather you own one thing from us that still holds its shape in three years than four that quietly let you down the way that shirt let me down.