made here with love

 
Our designs totally reflect who we are and where we have come from; we’re born and bred kiwi’s that love our land, so it just makes sense that our gear is wholly manufactured in our hometown.
 
Manufacturing here has so many benefits for us, our community, the planet and of course, you! We keep jobs and skills here; can deliver on our promise of high quality, limited-edition styles; our carbon footprint is kept to a minimum and we feel proud as punch for staying loyal to our roots!

we feel good about being new zealand-made because...

 
we keep new zealanders' in jobs (and boost the local economy).
chalkydigits’ garments pass through many local hands as they are dyed, cut, sewn, printed, embroidered etc and we have such long-standing relationships with all our manufacturers now that they are like our family! Times are tough out there now and we feel a sense of loyalty to them and their families, which means we would never want to threaten their livelihoods by taking all our work overseas. Having them close by means we can ensure they are paid fair wages, have good working conditions and can come out for coffee with us! We like that.

we ensure new zealanders' remain self-sufficient.
As more manufacturing is taken offshore there is a large skill base that is slowly being lost to kiwis. Maybe one day we won’t be able to produce our own clothes! The machinery required to manufacture clothing is disappearing from these shores, as it’s needed here less and less. For instance, fine knitting and linking machines are barely available in New Zealand anymore. This means that if we want to produce fine knitted garments we will have no choice but to ship our wool halfway round the world to get knitted and then ship it all the way back. How silly is that? (If anybody has a fine-knit machine buried in their backyard then please contact us, as we will happily come and help you dig it up!) All this makes us very dependent on overseas countries for one of life’s bare necessities and puts us in the vulnerable position of having to rely on diminishing fossil fuels to ship our clothing round and round and round the world…. and I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite liberal enough to run round naked all year long (also I have to admit I’m not tough enough – winters in the south are cold! brrrr).

we keep our planet clean and green.
Because our garments are not shipped back and forth around the world, our clothes have less impact on the environment; after all, it’s our stunning natural world that inspires us, so we really don’t want to pollute it in the making of our clothes.
Additionally, New Zealand has much stricter laws governing the emission of toxins in the process of manufacturing, so manufacturing here is much kinder to the environment and workers than in many other countries – and this helps us sleep better at night…zzzzz.

we only make the best quality clothes
While our clothing is being manufactured locally we are able to strictly monitor the whole process and ensure our standards of production are kept very high; something we couldn’t guarantee if everything was made on distant shores. Quite frankly, we expect the very best when it comes to our garments because we want to see chalkydigits customers wearing our clothing for years to come; we believe this is true value for money – and that’s only possible with high quality clothing that’s made to last in the rugged kiwi climate. We want to provide you with designs and styles and fabrics we can be proud of and so we work very closely with our manufacturers to make sure this happens.

all our clothes are original and limited edition
We are not in the clothing business to make hundreds of gazillions of dollars a year, so we don’t need to mass-manufacture the same old sorry designs to get the maximum bang for our buck. We produce funky home-grown designs and edgy prints because we LOVE designing cool clothes. (We quite like wearing them too!) Because we make here, we can (and do) produce a small number of each style/colour/print to keep our clothes fresh, unique and distinctive. Who wants to go to a barbeque and notice you are wearing the EXACT same clothes as seven of your friends?

New Zealanders' pride themselves on their originality and inventiveness – it’s what makes us quintessentially kiwi – and we want to showcase this individuality by making distinctly different designs – there’s something for everyone! We want you to be proud to wear your specially crafted kiwi clothes – because we are!

New Zealand made and proud of it.