Everlane T-shirts - Page 179

We used a better leather for the new weekends, but the difference is mainly in the nap of the back side, not the weight, so I don't think you will find them any more to your liking, sorry
Sure, I'll tell you how we went about it...
Cashmere quality is determined primarily by two factors: the length and thickness of the individual fibers.
- Thinner fibers are more pliable, and make a more flexible and softer to wear garment. This is the biggest determinant in price of material.
- Longer fibers resist pilling more - cashmere is inherently a very crinkly fiber, so shorter lengths tend to catch a lot and pill much more dramatically than longer length fibers
The post from above regarding initial softness addresses this point, that short fibers will create a fuzz that people associate with softness, as well as be more flexible initially because the fibers are not as strongly connected. In the review, softness was only briefly mentioned, so it's hard to tell what the exact line of comparison was - it seems his main complaint is about fit anyways, but we did some interesting things to measure quality and I am sure you guys would appreciate the info so here goes...
There are some objective ways to measure cashmere quality. We actually sent our samples to a textile lab, as well as samples from J Crew (the "Loro Piana" stuff) and Uniqlo (as a baseline). We tested the fabric across multiple criteria and these are the results we have:
Pilling: We did a pilling test, where they rub the fabric for a certain amount of time, I think 48 hours straight, with a mechanical actuator and see how much pillage forms. We won this comparison by a large margin, J Crew lost, and Uniqlo performed really well, much better than we expected, but we found out why after we measured fiber lengths.
Fiber Thickness and Length: Everlane fibers and J Crew fibers measured between 15.5 and 16 microns, which, objectively speaking is B+ quality on the scheme of things. The really crazy baller stuff from Cucienelli and LP will measure 14.5-15.0 and 14 for the really crazyexpensive stuff. The yields per goat on this level of finess is dramatically smaller - only certain small sections of the goat can possibly grow this fine. We initially picked our material for best price performance ratio - it was the best stuff we could find under the crazy price inflection point. Uniqlo cashmere measured 17+ microns and were a lot shorter than ours - which puts them a couple of grades below us in terms of quality, but their chemical process is very extensive - they use a lot of softeners to make their fabric more pliable and straight, so they weave flatter and perform on par in the pilling test.
From the objective measurements, we can tell that our material quality is on par with J Crew's, and much better than Uniqlo, and I can tell you internally that when we were faced with the choice of skimping on quality vs. buying more expensive material, to the point that we had to break the intial $100 branding strategy, we went with the latter.