How to make a living off creating 200 pieces a year

All of Church’s pieces are produced in his one-man atelier in a block just outside the Châtillon–Montrouge Métro station in Paris, and, where most brands are looking to scale their businesses, Church is actively trying to limit it. After a decade of working in fashion, he was looking to develop a business model that didn’t require him to overproduce, where he could build a real relationship with the garments he was creating. Working with a highly limited number of stockists and producing only 200 or so pieces per year, he keeps his work in high demand, reducing wastage while he’s at it. 

Although his method of hand-making each garment isn’t unique to Church, he knows his customers and how to reach them, while remaining realistic about the parameters of his brand’s growth. Having been “at capacity” for orders since 2022, just two years after launching his namesake label, he has no intentions of expanding that list, aside from a potential line of knitwear produced by a small family-owned factory outside of the Italian city of Lucca.

For the first in a series looking at how designers manage to create sustainable businesses that work, we sat down with Church – the most slow-fashion guy we could think of – to talk business.

Can you describe Oliver Church the brand?

Oliver Church is me and I make clothing. I produce clothing by hand, completely by myself, so the nature of the work is singular, hence the tagline: ‘singular garments’. I use a lot of antique and vintage fabrics, and hand-dyeing and hand-finishing, so the hand is very present in the work. I want people to feel like it was made by one person and to make clothes that feel like they exist out of time: they might be modern-ish silhouettes, but the finishing is not modern, the dyeing is not modern. 

Could you describe what’s so unique about your work?

When you work like this, there’s some things you can’t control and I let those things show. When you’re using older fabrics, or hand sewing techniques, there are some things that will come out differently every time, based on tension or on things you can’t see in the fabric before you dye it or apply a mordant. There are also things that affect hand dyeing on a given day, so you can get a lot of variation, even if you keep the recipes very similar or the same. The clothing I’m trying to make is process-driven, because I’m making it all, and so the designing comes from that process.

Could you expand on that a little, the idea that your work is process-driven rather than design-led?

I have 25 styles that I offer at the moment, and I make up to 200 pieces a year, so I might make the same style 40 times in a year. When you’re doing that, when you sit down with a piece for 10 hours or 20 hours, it makes you think about how you could change it, and why you would change it, or what would you do if you made a different piece. You’re taking all of that experience of making it each time. What would make that better or more interesting? When you’re sewing, you’ll notice that certain stitches are nice, or certain stitches work better, or certain widths of stitches are nicer. 

What kind of person do you think it takes to work the way that you do?

When I started, I must have known intuitively or tacitly that I wouldn’t get bored sewing button holes. I don’t know how many thousands of buttonholes I’ve sewn, maybe 10,000 – and I still enjoy sewing them. Maybe enjoy isn’t the right word… I am still interested in doing it; I still like to do it well.

Why did you decide to run your brand like this? 

I had been working in the industry for 10 years before I started the brand, and I think when you have seen so many clothes and so many collections pass, you get a bit of product fatigue. Maybe in a collection you’ll be like, ‘Oh, I am really happy with this piece or this idea.’ But the whole collection? Probably not. There are always things that you forget because they weren’t as good as other pieces, or they were fillers, and I sort of hated that element of it. Plus when you go into a department store, which I don’t do very often, there’s a sameness to collections. I hate going to a store and feeling all the clothes and not being able to tell which brand is which. There’s such a homogenisation of product. So the time I’d spent in the industry made me feel like if I was going to make clothes, I didn’t want to make clothes how everyone else was making them. I wanted it to reflect what I enjoy about clothes and what I enjoy about buying clothes. I’ve always loved markets and vintage stores, so finding something that’s different or finding something that stands out has always been exciting. 

How do you communicate that your work is so process driven to the customer?

From my experience, menswear customers are really interested in knowing about the product. Womenswear customers as well, but I think there’s something about the menswear market which is much more obsessive. They want to know why the thing is special and they want to know what makes it interesting and how things were done. Like, when I say this fabric is from the 1950s I often get people asking: ‘How do you know it’s from the 1950s? What can I look for to know that it’s from the 1950s?’ and I can be like, ‘Well, I bought it from one of my vendors at the market who searches for fabrics for me, she bought it in the Loire from the child of an old fabric store owner, and they put everything in storage when they retired. The store runs from this date to this date, it’s a short width fabric, it has francs on the label…’ My customers are often asking for that level of detail whenever I’m talking to them in person. If not, I try to fill people in on my Instagram page, I try to talk about exactly what I’m doing and how I’m finishing each piece. Not all the time – I don’t want to overdo it, but if I show a picture of a certain finishing that I think is interesting, or why it’s interesting, I’ll write a note about it. I think a little bit more education about the quality of clothing would have people keeping their clothes a lot longer.

Or investing in them to begin with.

Yeah, because making good clothes takes time!

What motivates you to continue to pursue a particularly unconventional method of production in today’s landscape?

I like clothes more than I like the idea of being a big name or running a big fashion company – or being in charge of people! I’ve always worked for smaller companies, where you often have more multifaceted jobs. This was always more interesting to me than being roped into a small but more lucrative role in a bigger company, where you often have to do the same thing on repeat. I worked at Garbstore from 2014 to 2017 and then at Casey Casey in 2018 and 2019, and I was doing a lot of different roles when I worked. It made the jobs very interesting and very dynamic. I knew a lot of friends when I was in London who were doing much better on paper in their career. They were doing the right things to get the right jobs, and they were heads of design, of different departments or whatever. They definitely wouldn’t have been envious of my paycheck, but they were envious of the work I was doing, because my roles were also usually quite autonomous.

You’ve mentioned before that being involved with a brand like Casey Casey – its size, the world that it resides in – was a great education. Can you explain what you learned and how this has affected how you work?

The major thing I learned there was that there was a really strong interest in unique work from independent retailers around the world. With the limits that independent retailers have in terms of money to spend and things like that, you have people who are much more involved in the buying process, so their choices are going to be more thoroughly considered. They are always the first people who will take the risks, who will take on new brands, and they’re the ones that will build those brands because they’re invested. That’s the type of person you want to sell your clothes to. You want to have people who are really interested in the project, interested in the brand, and then they can pass this information on to the customer. If you don’t have a strong social media or marketing influence or budget, getting accepted into a high-end market is harder, but the port for that is trusted retail. Being exposed to a market like this was a real eye opener in terms of what I felt that I could do in the future, because I understood that I didn’t have to sell a lot of clothes to make a living. Being able to meet and have relationships with all these brilliant store owners is actually something I’ve always prioritised over doing direct orders. At Casey, the education also came from them having an in-house atelier with very talented patternmakers, machinists and cutters. Being able to work closely with people focused on technique is always a great opportunity to learn, both for particular techniques but also in terms of how this affects designing.

What was the first year of business like for you? 

The first year was during Covid. And I had the le chômage [unemployment benefit] which is a beautiful innovation of French socialism. So, because I had worked in France, I had a benefit from the government that, during Covid, was indispensable. I spent that time developing shapes and ideas for the first year – which obviously was an incredible opportunity. Not many people can take a year off, and mine was truly the grace of the French social system. In terms of stores, I targeted Japan at first, because there was an interest in artisanat. I use French fabrics, I make the majority of pieces by hand, I’m from New Zealand… I think all of these things are seen as positives [in the Japanese market]. They’re also one of the first markets that will take risks on new labels.

How long did it take you to get to a point where this was a self-sustaining business?

Two and a half years. The first year, I had five stores, but obviously they’re testing a new product, and no one knew what I was doing or who I was. The great thing about Japan is that stores were really willing to take on a non-seasonal product which I didn’t want to go on sale – which is rare! The second year, I got to 10 wholesalers which is what I had worked out was the minimum for me [to sustain the business]. I had already decided I wanted to limit the amount of garments I was giving to each store so, I worked out that 10 would be enough. Since the end of 2022, I’ve been at capacity.

You mean you can’t physically produce any more clothes in the way you want to do it – alone, by hand in the atelier, etc.?

Yeah, I could technically do it, but it would disrupt other life things.

There’s obviously demand for your work. How do you manage expectations from buyers who want to buy more product than you can make for them?

At the start, it was really hard. I had a lot of interest in Japan, but I was aware that I was only just starting, and I needed to wait before taking too much on. The way I manage is just through transparency. Having clients that really understand how I work is important. Even if I can’t work with stores, I will tell people that I really like their work and the store, but it’s not possible. It’s so nice that people get in contact with me about my clothing! The thing I like about working alone and working the way I work is that I get to meet really lovely people and develop relationships with them. So that’s how I manage the demand, just being nice to people. Honestly, I like people even more than I like clothing. 

How long does it take to make your work? 

I do around 20 units of clothing a month. A unit for me is my standard shirt, and so anything more than that will take away from those 20 pieces that I’m making. A coat might take two days to make on my 10-hour-per-day schedule. One shirt could take anywhere between 10 and 15 hours. My standard shirt will take me maybe 40 minutes to cut, three to five hours on the machine, depending on how I finish it. Each buttonhole is between 15 to 25 minutes. There’s the washing or the dyeing, and then there’s the laundering, a garment bag takes half an hour to make. And then there’s ticketing and labelling, so probably just over 10 hours complete. There’s also lost hours. You wash a piece, or you launder a piece… If I have a day off work, it’s also time added to that. I know my work is expensive, but I often price my work around the idea of an hourly wage. 

How important is your location to how you work?

France is a cheaper place to live than London or New York. There are certain places you can do certain things that you can’t do in other places, and so where you are should really be affecting what you’re doing – although obviously the minimum wage is quite low in France, and Paris is a lot more expensive than other places. I don’t think I will be in Paris forever, but the fact that we’ve got these beautiful fabrics that are still abundant and available, that have already been made, the fact that there are amazing market workers who go up and down the country every week finding these things, and that I can work in Paris – all of that together makes the brand. 

How does working alone affect how you approach your work?

I have a lot of spare headspace, but not a lot of time. In many jobs in the fashion industry, it’s like a pressure cooker because there’s so much to manage – it can be overwhelming. Often you’re thinking about the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. That takes a lot of headspace. My job is 95% [manual] labour, but not always mentally tiring. I have a lot of time to think about the best way to make these pieces, or the best way to finish this order. In any job you have working for a bigger company, you have much more demand on your headspace. 

Why do you think this ‘business model’ has worked for you? 

I’ve always approached it with an emphasis on good communication and good interpersonal relationships. And when you don’t have those as a basis for things, everything becomes harder, no matter what you’re doing.