No investors, no factory deals, no drop-shipped blanks. Just two people who got tired of paying $90 for a t-shirt that fell apart in eight months.
Lowfield started in a one-car garage in East Austin. The press was used. The blanks came from a small US mill that didn't want to talk to us at first. The first run went up on a small online shop, mostly for friends.
We didn't have a plan. We had a frustration with how much streetwear costs and how badly most of it falls apart.
We could have chased the "scale it" playbook — overseas manufacturing, drop-ship fulfillment, paid ads on every shirt. We chose not to.
Going small was the actual move. Four drops a year, small batches, every shirt screen-printed by hand in the shop. We'd rather sell 300 shirts of something we made than 3,000 shirts of something a contractor in Vietnam made for $2 a unit.
The biggest unlock for us was noticing how much streetwear is printed on thin 5.3oz blanks. Cheap, thin, and pilled to hell after ten washes.
By Vol. 03 we'd switched every base layer to 8oz heavyweight blanks from US mills. Our hoodies are 14oz fleece. Our long sleeves are 8oz minimum. You pay $48 for our tee, you get a shirt that'll still look like a shirt in five years.
Today we print out of a small East Austin shop. Every shirt still gets pulled by hand. Every drop is still four-a-year, small-batch, sold until it's gone.
Vol. 04 is 14 SKUs across tees, hoodies, and accessories. Vol. 05 is dropping in 14 days — fall capsule, two new heavyweight tees, our first run of denim. The shop hasn't moved. The standard hasn't moved.