Our Story
Our 18 Month Journey…….
We just want to take a moment to tell you a little about ourselves. And the events that led us to this moment in time.
We are a group of young Engineering friends from Auckland, New Zealand.
Like most people, we work hard in an ever-changing world. Shopping isn’t something that we do all the time. However when a certain brand catches our eyes, we can’t help but spend our hard-earned money on it. We tend to find that the more popular the brand the more expensive they are. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the quality of the garments in question are up to standard. In-fact most of these items sell because they have so much money spent on marketing them, rather than using that money to improve the quality of their product.
One Summer’s evening in good old, New Zealand. A few of us were standing around the BBQ, having a few cold beers and the usual banter when the topic of inferior clothing with ridiculous price tags came up. We realised that more people shared our matching views on the topic. Several of us having a passion in deciding we would finally do something about it.
And so, the ‘Three Wise Men’ as we have dubbed ourselves, decided to get together the following week and see what we could come up with on the topic. Hence a mighty long brain storming session was underway. We talked about everything we would want as a consumer ourselves. And top of that list was, quality. Second being value for money. So we decided to explore everything we could about the industry in fine detail. Completely picking apart everything we could about the clothing industry. We needed to see if we could produce something that met our simple requirements. First and foremost, Quality followed closely by Value.
Being a group of young go getters from New Zealand, we decided to do things the only way we as Engineers knew how to, that being, to get out there and do it. We got up from the couch on our weekends off and visited stores all over, Auckland and Wellington. Looking at garments to find the best quality we could find. Once we had our samples in hand, we begun the arduous task of contacting manufacturers all over the world. Ones who dealt with manufacturing for the big clothing brands. It didn’t take long to notice that there were only a very few companies who could produce the quality that we wanted. We bombarded them with sample after sample each time using one basic line “We are looking for, a quality that is better than these garments”. And that my friends Is how we succeeded in getting the ball rolling……
What we realised over the months that followed was that the process was a lot more complex than we had initially thought. Our homes and garages became testing stations, we had so many pieces of the puzzle to get together. And processes to follow to get the perfect garment created which met OUR personal standards. The main issue we found was that, in order to get the product up to code we had to use multiple manufacturers, ones we could get the best quality on raw cotton, fabric, dye, stitching, tags, embroidery, labels and the list goes on. Once all these goals had been met we needed to find a single manufacturer that would be able to piece all these bits and pieces back together. We could have done it cheap. But that really wasn’t our main objective.
Our end goal was QUALITY!
Our hope is that our products speak for itself. Each piece we have created shows another piece of our journey.
The journey started with a group of mates standing around the BBQ one night in Auckland. And the final products are now known as ‘ShadesOfBlack’
We truly hope you enjoy our products as much as we have enjoyed bringing them to you.