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 have manufactured all of our knitwear in Portugal, near Porto, in our Braga workshop since 1958. Sustainable development isn't just about the environment. The human dimension and the relationships that bind us to our Portuguese partners are essential. Made in Europe and "Made in chez nous" are 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
Each season our collections showcase refined volumes, stitch patterns and sophisticated knitting techniques. Jersey, intarsia, jacquard, cable or pearl rib, our house, a specialist in quality knitting, perpetuates its ancestral know-how from generation to generation. With its flat-bed looms in multiple gauges 7, 14, 24, 27, 30… our production tool is the fruit of an industrial heritage of more than 145 years, constantly modernized and updated, which is refined with each collection.
THE ART OF
FULLY FASHIONED
Our pieces are knitted in shape, a technique also called fully-fashioned, which avoids any waste and pre-consumer material. This process consists of knitting the different panels, neckline, sleeves and ribbing separately before proceeding to the remeshing, that is to say, their assembly. For us, this step is carried out essentially by hand, stitch by stitch. A meticulous and anachronistic artisanal know-how that is almost a resistance, inspired by the method of making silk stockings that dates back to our hosiery origins at the end of the 19th century.
PRESERVING
OUR KNOW-HOW
Because the expertise of hand-meshing has been lost over the past decades of deindustrialization in Europe, we have been training new teams of hand-meshing workers in our Portuguese workshop in Braga for the past two years to meet demand.
These apprentices, guided by experienced workers, acquire over time this fundamental know-how in the world of quality knitwear and actively help us maintain it.
GARMENT DYEING
Another legacy and trademark of our House: plunge dyeing, a technical term that means that the pieces are colored by dipping them into a dye bath. Léo Gros, the grandfather of the current managers, himself the son of a dyer, gave up buying colored yarn in the 1960s, favoring unbleached yarn and thus dyeing the garments after their knitting. This scientific process allows us to create our custom color ranges while mastering the recipe for our baths, which meet the most protective European regulatory requirements for consumer health.
Traceability
To determine the impact of our products, it is imperative to understand and trace their life cycle, from the raw material production stage to the end of the finished product's life. In the fashion industry, it is customary to categorize suppliers into different "tiers," from the closest to the brand to the furthest removed.
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
Driven by a desire for transparency with our customers, we have been adding information to our e-shop since fall/winter 2024 on the environmental qualities and characteristics of our products, which go beyond the requirements of the AGEC law.
Each product sheet indicates the last three or four manufacturing steps, as well as greenhouse gas emissions, blue water consumption, and the percentage of work carried out in Europe to manufacture the part.
