How We Found Our Supplier

Every brand has an origin story. Ours involves a suit shop in Dublin, a phone call that lasted five minutes, and a car journey through the Italian countryside conducted almost entirely in two languages neither of us could properly speak.
It started, like a lot of things in this business, with a favour.
My co-founder Patrick was working in a suit shop in Dublin at the time. He had a hunch that his boss — a man who’d spent decades in menswear — would know someone, somewhere, who made ties properly. So one afternoon, Patrick brought me in to ask.
His boss didn’t hesitate. He picked up the phone, dialled a number from memory, and chatted away for what felt like five solid minutes before handing the phone to me without much explanation.
On the other end was a man who, it turned out, was an Italian based in New York — chatty, warm, and an absolute natural salesman. Within minutes he was telling me, with total conviction, that he had access to the best ties money could buy, and that the retail value of what he was describing was eye-watering. Twenty minutes after that call ended, I had a flight booked to Milan for the following week.
The plan was to meet him in person. That part didn’t quite happen. But what did happen turned out to be far better.
Instead, we were met at the airport by the owner of the factory itself — a man named Ferrari (no relation to the cars, as he was quick to point out, since he turned up in something far more practical). He drove us from Milan to Como, and that drive became one of my favourite memories of the entire trip.
Here’s the thing: Mr. Ferrari’s English was about as good as my Italian — which is to say, barely there on either side. And yet somehow, for the entire hour from Milan to Como, through three or four hours at the factory, and all the way to the hotel afterwards, we talked. Constantly. Half the time neither of us had any idea what the other was actually saying, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was enough — a word here, a gesture there, a lot of nodding and smiling — to keep the conversation going the whole way. Patrick, sitting in the back, spent most of the journey looking faintly amazed that this was actually working.
By the time we arrived at the factory, it didn’t matter that we couldn’t fully understand each other. The place spoke for itself.
It was everything you’d hope an Italian silk factory would be — a proper showroom, looms and equipment, and rows of shelving stacked with rolls of silk in colours and patterns we hadn’t seen anywhere else. There was a sampling room where finished pieces were ready to go, ties in every stage of completion, and a small team working alongside Mr. Ferrari, including a couple of wonderfully kind women who kept bringing us coffee as we worked our way through the samples.
We spent hours there, going through pattern after pattern, picking out what we loved and putting aside what didn’t feel right. By the end of it, despite the language barrier — or maybe partly because of it, since there was a lot of pointing, holding things up to the light, and miming approval — we walked out with around 20 samples and a deal that felt right for both sides.
Those samples became our first collection.
Looking back, it’s a strange thing to admit: one of the most important business relationships we have was built almost entirely without a shared language. But somehow, between the coffee, the silk, and a lot of patient nodding, we understood each other perfectly when it counted.
Every Italian silk tie we sell today traces back to that factory, that drive from Milan to Como, and an afternoon where two people with barely a dozen words in common managed to agree on everything that mattered.
You can see the results of that first trip — and the collections that have followed since — in our Italian Silk range.