How our ethical clothes are made

We are pleased to introduce you to the different manufacturing stages of our garments. It is important to us that you understand the design process when you buy from us.

WE PRODUCE LIMITED QUANTITIES WITHOUT FOLLOWING ANY FASHION CALENDAR

You've probably wondered why our clothes take so long to be available. In fact, it takes around 4-5 months to design and create our clothes if all goes well. Sometimes we have certain delays, but it is important that the people that are working on our clothing take reasonable time to produce them without feeling rushed to be more productive. It is also important to note that, for environmental reasons, we have decided to produce exclusive garments in limited quantities without following any fashion calendar.

There is nothing better than when the entire Mimi & August team comes together to design and see what the next collection will be. We take into account the opinion of our customers and that is why we use our social media to ask YOU what you want and what YOU would like to see in our next collection.

Once the designs are defined, we make digital prototypes to be able to visualize all the garments together. Now production can begin.

COLOR TESTING

Choosing the color of our clothing is kind of the fun part in all of this, all of our colors are custom made for us and we choose them with Pantone color book specific to fabrics. We then send the technical sheets to start testing the colors on our different types of fabric. The color tests can take up to two weeks. The color must come out the same as the Pantone color we have chosen.

WEAVING FABRICS

During this time, the weaving of the fabric can begin. This step can take between 2 to 3 weeks. It all depends on the quantity of fabrics that will be used for the collection. As soon as the fabric is ready, it will leave for dyeing (the longest step). Again, this part is done according to our demands and is made especially for us.

FABRIC DYEING

The dyeing of the fabrics takes approximately 5 weeks. As you may know, the dyeing process is one of the most polluting stages in textile production. It is in this process that large amounts of water are wasted. Fortunately, we are working with a company in Lima that uses new technologies. Their process allows us to reduce water use by 30%. At the moment, it is difficult for us to find other methods of dyeing our fabrics in Peru but we will continue to work hard to reduce the use of water with methods such as native natural dye, Dyecoo and ColorZen.

THE FINAL STEP

There are a few steps left to finalize our clothes. The cutting process may take 2-3 days. 

As soon as the cut is finalized, the parts will leave for assembly while the rest will be transferred for printing our illustrations. As soon as the illustration is printed, we can finally finish the process and  bring our design to life. 

We must not forget the quality control that will be carried out before the clothes leave for Montreal. All faulty clothing will still be shipped. They may be defective, but can still be used! Most of the time they only have a few stains. As for the rest of the production, we will carry out a second quality control before putting them online.