The brilliant and kind Gianfranco Chicco writes a super lovely monthly newsletter called The Craftsman. For it, he meets and interviews craftsmen (and women, obviously) around the world about their projects, products, and passions.
I’m super happy, and very much humbled, that Gianfranco approached us to feature Zephyr Berlin in the March edition (read issue #006 on Medium):
Zephyr, Pants That Travel Well And Are Built To Last
Zephyr was born as a side project of technologists and real life couple Peter Bihr and Michelle Thorne, who wanted to create a pair of trousers following the philosophy that they should be super versatile, as sustainable and long lasting as possible, and made locally in Berlin, where they live. For this, they recruited fashion designer Cecilia Palmer and scouted a Swiss-made fabric that suited this purpose. According to Peter, the fabric’s synthetic origin was a drawback, but it was the only product that would satisfy their requirements. A first batch of 100 was launched in time for Christmas 2016 using Kickstarter, followed by 100 more of their men’s cut, as they’ve sold incredibly better even to women who preferred a looser fit. Durability was a key concern, so they adopted heavy stitching and embraced the old practice of providing an extra inch of fabric here and there to allow for small alterations. Following their expertise in creating digital products, they’ve taken an iterative approach to the design of Zephyr which led to the second batch having ultra deep pockets that would provide a secure hold for our ever growing smartphones. The team is looking into doing something with merino wool next, which his considered a natural super-fabric.
Zephyr Berlin is very much a passion project of Michelle’s and mine, and we dug deep into the craft aspect when working with our designer Cecilia. Also, I loved that he gave a shout-out to our iterated designs that feature extra deep pockets, the model we internally nick-named The Deep-Pocketed One.
Here’s the blog post over on zephyrberlin.com.
