Part 3: Six weeks, again and again six weeks...

Made for the Stands – the story behind Casualline · Part 3

The techpacks were done, the fabrics were chosen. Shortly after, the first samples arrived at our partner and we drove back over. It's called a fitting: you put the pieces on and check whether the cut really sits the way you imagined it. We wanted one logo position moved, plus a few visual details. Then we commissioned the next round.

And this is exactly where our thinking went wrong, or maybe it was a lack of information flow. We assumed the PPS samples would come next. Pre-production samples, meaning the pieces that look exactly like the later goods and trigger production once we approve them. What actually arrived were ordinary samples again. Without labelled buttons on the polo, without branded zippers. So without the details that are the whole reason we go to all this effort.

The real PPS samples needed another six weeks. That took the planned shop opening in December 2025 off the table and we pushed it to March 2026.

In January they finally trickled in. And again something was off: there were woven patches on the sleeves, but not the ones we had ordered.

So off to the Zoom call. We went through the patch design once more and locked it down for good. While we were at it, we also adjusted the cut of the zip hoodie, which we still didn't like, and brought it almost exactly in line with the crew-neck zipper. For us that was small stuff you sort out on screen, without a whole new sampling round starting from scratch.

Two weeks later came the sobering news: new PPS samples were needed after all. And because there were holidays in between plus the odd foreseeable event, it would now take six to eight weeks. And so March turned into June 2026.

By that point at the latest, we started questioning a lot of things and our minds began churning again; a lot of grey days lay ahead of us. Had we maybe picked the wrong partner? Was it our approach? Maybe we had communicated sloppily and never spelled out our expectations clearly enough. Maybe it was simply a very ordinary misunderstanding between sender and receiver, the kind that happens everywhere. And then the question of whether our expectations were even realistic. Whether it's just part of the deal that a process like this eats up time – no matter how much money you invest.

At that point our sanity slowly started to tip. A completely black basic collection, ready sometime in early summer. Who buys something like that in June? We took a few days and then decided to turn the collection into an autumn collection. Not because we wanted to, but because nothing else made sense anymore, and it also gave us more time to work on the pre-launch.

And then it finally came. The moment that set a lot of things right again. The first finished pieces in our hands. Not as samples with tags attached and missing features, but finished. Nothing had been overpromised, and suddenly we were really pumped again for everything still to come. The hardships we'd had to endure for months were slowly, finally coming to an end. Balm for the soul.