Every Wild Donkey piece starts as a blank from a supplier we've worked with in Turin, comes together at our own factory, and finishes in the hands of a small group of specialist craftsmen, each chosen for one skill rather than all of them: embroidery, washing, finishing. Different workshops, different corners of the country, one standard the whole way through.

We could send any part of this elsewhere. Cheaper blanks, embroidery run at a factory that also does a thousand other brands, washing outsourced to whoever quotes lowest that month. We don't, because the shortcuts show up eventually: in the stitching, the wash, the way a hem sits after three washes instead of thirty. Keeping the whole chain in Italy, and specifically with craftsmen who specialise in one process rather than doing all of them badly, means someone is actually accountable for how a piece turns out. It's slower. It costs more. It's also the only version of quality we're interested in standing behind.

Every piece starts as a blank, sourced from a supplier in Turin we trust to get the base fabric right before it ever reaches us. From there, it's built at our own factory, then handed to specialist craftsmen for the parts that need one very particular skill. Gradient dyeing means someone standing at a workbench spraying pigment onto the garment by hand, one piece at a time, until the colour runs from dark to light exactly where it should. Stone washing uses actual pumice stones tumbling against the fabric, not a chemical shortcut, which is why no two pieces fade quite the same way. The pieces with sun-faded detailing get an acid spray aimed by hand at the seams, pressure points and edges, the same spots that would fade first if you wore the piece for ten years, except it's done now. None of it comes out identical on purpose. If every piece looked the same, we'd know something in the process had gone wrong.

Every piece starts life as a heavyweight cotton or French terry blank (240gsm and up), sourced from our supplier in Turin because a t-shirt or hoodie that feels substantial out of the wash is one people actually keep wearing. The treatments come after, handled by specialist craftsmen in small runs, so no two dye lots behave quite the same way. Some pieces come out with a slight twist at the seam or a shrink you only get from a strong wash, the kind of thing a factory chasing speed would sand out. We leave it in.