The textile industry is one of the biggest polluters, emitting 4 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year. That's more than the impact of international flights and maritime traffic combined.
OUR WORKSHOP
We are proud to manufacture all our knitwear in Portugal, near Porto, in our Braga workshop since 1959.
Sustainable development isn't just about the environment. The human dimension and the relationships that bind us to our Portuguese partners are paramount. And Made in Europe is a guarantee of quality, transparency and social and environmental compliance.
BSCI AUDITED
Our Braga workshop has been audited by the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI). This corporate social compliance initiative aims to protect workers' trade union rights and improve their working conditions, ensuring their health and safety with decent working hours and wages. It outlaws forced and child labor, and is involved in the fight to protect the environment.
OUR KNOW-HOW :
KNITWEAR
All our unique dyes, which are respectful of human health and the environment, are developed in our own factory and approved in Europe according to the REACH standard. Our linen and cotton yarns are certified OEKO-TEX® Standard 100, a quality label that guarantees, through rigorous testing, the absence of harmful chemical substances in textile products and therefore the safety of the materials used during the production process, and this goes beyond European regulatory requirements.
THE ART OF
FULLY FASHIONED
Our garments are knitted to shape, a technique also known as fully-fashioned, which avoids any waste of pre-consumer material. This process consists in knitting the various components of the garment before proceeding to remaillage, i.e. linking. For us, this stage is essentially carried out by hand, stitch by stitch, guaranteeing quality and durability.
It's an anachronistic, almost resistance-inspired craft, inspired by the silk stocking-making method that dates back to our origins as hosiery makers in the late 19th century.
PRESERVING
OUR KNOW-HOW
Because hand-linking expertise has been lost over the last decades of de-industrialization in Europe, we have been training new teams of linkers in our Portuguese Braga workshop over the last few months to keep up with demand.
These apprentices, guided by experienced workers, acquire this fundamental know-how in the world of quality knitwear over time, and actively help us to perpetuate it.
GARMENT DYEING
Another heritage and hallmark of our House is garment dyeing, that is the process of dyeing a fabric after it's been linked into finished garments. The dye is absorbed in the piece of clothing during the washing process, which results in even color coverage.
Léo Gros, the grandfather of the current management team and himself the son of a dyer, gave up buying colored yarns in the 1960s, opting instead to use unbleached yarns alone to dye garments after knitting.
This scientific process enables us to create our own customized color ranges, while controlling the recipe for our baths, which meet the strictest European regulatory requirements for consumer health protection.
TIER 1 +
This is the assembly of the finished piece. For most fashion brands, this is the confection stage, but for us, as fully fashioned knitting specialists, it's the linking stage ("remaillage" in French).
TIER 2 +
These suppliers manufacture the final material. In wovenwear, this is weaving. At Maison Montagut, this is the knitting stage.
TIER 3 +
This tier includes all those responsible for processing raw materials. In our case, this involves spinning the material: cashmere, linen, organic cotton, viscose or merino wool.
TIER 4 +
At the origin of the supply chain is the cultivation, breeding or extraction of plant, animal, cellulosic or synthetic raw materials.
Outstanding traceability
At Maison Montagut, we know all our tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers, which is still very rare in the fashion industry, where supply chains are often globalized, opaque and fragmented. This is because we work with our workshop in Portugal to manufacture 100% of our autumn-winter collections and 95% of our spring-summer collections. The remaining 5%, woven linen only, is made in Lithuania by a long-standing partner. And to trace the origin of our materials, we have partnered with a traceability specialist to identify our Tier 4 suppliers, such as livestock farms and agricultural cooperatives, from 2024 onwards.
TRANSPARENCY
We are not yet subject to the obligations of the AGEC law in terms of consumer information. However, driven by a desire for transparency vis-à-vis our customers, we plan to affix a QR code to the labels or hangtad of some of our products from 2024.
These individual codes will trace the last 3 stages in the manufacture of our products, as well as the percentage of recycled materials and the absence of hazardous substances.
