Avre Friday Briefing #81
This week we've made progress on two fronts. Firstly we've been honing our Batch No. 5 launch plans and secondly, the current Battledress blouse orders are coming along nicely. We've also got a shout-out for a friend of our brand.
Batch No. 5 Launch
This week we've been discussing our launch plans for the Windak. Needless to say, it's garnered quite a bit of attention since we announced it at We Have Ways Fest a few weeks ago.
We started work on it last December. It took the best part of nine months to product a prototype we could take to the festival, and even then we had to use a stand-in camo. More on that below.
The jacket contains six main elements, and we deal with different suppliers for each:
- The design: pattern and construction
- The camo pattern
- The fabric
- The zip
- The studs, plus custom tooling to fit them
- The ribbing for collar and cuffs
As regular readers will know, we were able to borrow an original Windak from the Airborne Assault Museum in Duxford. This meant we could match every item from the list above to the original garment. Here's Pete wearing the original.
This particular jacket was owned by Major Charles Strafford, education officer for 6th Airborne Division in Normandy. He created and edited the daily news sheet for divisional troops ‘Pegasus Goes To It!’ originally written out on a captured German typewriter.
The Camo
One of the first things we did when we got the original was take it to a specialist print designer in Shoreditch, London who recreated the exact pattern digitally. We then spent a few hours painstakingly matching the colours from the garment to modern Pantone references to build a digital tile of the pattern.
The Fabric
With the camo digitised we then had to match the fabric. The Windak's original specification for it to be wind and rot proof, which is where the "Wind" in "Windak" comes from. The "Ak" was simply taken from the brand Kodak which was popular at the time.
Matching the fabric was one job. Getting the camo printed on it was another. Our original fabric supplier told us they could print it, and we spent months going back and forth between them, the print designer and ourselves trying to make it work. We paid for two strike-offs (test prints on the actual cloth) before it became clear it wasn't going to happen. The strike-offs just never looked like the original, the colours were all wrong. So rather than settle for something that we knew wasn't right, we took the difficult decision to start from scratch with a different supplier. That's why the prototypes we showed at We Have Ways had a stand-in camo.
The original garment next to the first set of rejected strike-offs
Frustrating, but better to find out at sampling than halfway through production. We're now working with a new mill and printer and the strike-offs are just right.
Mike Fernie
Mike is a total legend and one of our unofficial brand ambassadors. He's living his dream, making content about the things he loves, notably engines and cars. Before going solo, Mike spent eight-plus years at Drive Tribe where he became Head of Video.
He often wears his Avre jackets in his videos. In one of his latest, he got up close with a Red Bull F1 car while wearing his Batch No. 3 Shawl Collar Shirt. We've always said the shirt is our most versatile piece yet - and Mike wears it well!
Catch Mike's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@Mike_Fernie
Batch No. 4 Battledress
We've moved from cutting to construction, meaning our machines are now awash with the 100% merino wool cloth we chose for this garment. It's from Hainsworth's, an historic family-run mill in Yorkshire who have been making cloth for over 200 years. Everything they make is piece-dyed, blended, spun, and woven on-site in Pudsey, West Yorkshire. The fabric is part of their True Heritage line meaning the weight and colour is purposely restricted to its historic origin. It's about as authentic as it can be.
