Changing a neck label sounds small until you're the one doing it. It's the one piece of the shirt every customer eventually turns inside out and reads. A name, a place, a promise about who made the thing and where. The nuance and change from one label to another marks the eras of time as a company evolves.
We brought in Alyssa Barnes, a designer who has worked on identity for some of the oldest heritage brands still operating in this country, to help us get the type and layout right. The kind of small, patient decisions that don't announce themselves but are the difference between a label that looks considered and one that just looks decorated.
The typeface is Columbia Titling. A sturdy, all-caps slab serif with a genuinely good backstory: it was originally cut for the SS Columbia Project, drawn from signage found aboard that 1902 steamship, the kind of bold, carved-looking letterform that wood type and shipboard sign makers used when a name needed to survive weather and distance. It has the same visual weight as a quarterboard off a New England sailboat. Confident, a little worn-in by design, built to be read at a glance rather than admired up close. For a company name that's been stitched into shirt collars since 1933, it felt right.
Underneath it we included: "Sewn in Fall River, MA." Every shirt we make still comes off machines in this city, run by people who've been doing this work for decades. That's not a marketing line for us; it's our home. And it earned the second most important spot on the shirt.
Sizes are hand stamped, not printed. It's one more small refusal to let a machine do everything. It means no two labels are pressed exactly the same, which is either an inconsistency or a signature, depending on who's asking.
