Craftsmanship · 5 March 2026 · 6 min read
Inside Our Portuguese Factories
Two hours north of Porto, in the valleys around Guimarães, sits one of the densest concentrations of garment-making skill in Europe. It is where most of what we sell is made — and where we go, several times a year, to see it happen.
Words by N&N Editorial
The north of Portugal has been making textiles since the Middle Ages, and it shows. The region around Guimarães and Braga is a working landscape of spinners, dyehouses, knitters and sewing rooms, many of them family businesses into their second or third generation. When we started N&N in 2019, we visited eleven factories across four countries. We came home having placed our first order in Portugal, and we have never seriously considered moving it.
The reasons are practical rather than romantic. Proximity means we can be at the factory door within a day of leaving London. EU labour law means the baseline for wages, hours and safety is set by statute, not by our audit schedule. And the depth of local skill means that when we want to do something properly — a fully-fashioned collar, a garment-dyed sweat — someone within twenty minutes’ drive has been doing it for decades.
The knitters
Our jersey — every tee, polo and sweat — starts at a circular knitting mill on the edge of Guimarães, a business run by the founder’s daughter with around forty staff. The mill knits our fabric to order, which is slower than buying greige stock but means the weight and handle are exactly what we specified, batch after batch.
Watching a 240gsm jersey come off the machine is quietly hypnotic: a slow rotating drum of needles producing a seamless tube of cloth at a walking pace. Faster machines exist. The mill keeps these because slower knitting puts less tension on the yarn, and less tension means a softer, more stable fabric.
“Slower knitting puts less tension on the yarn — and less tension means a fabric that keeps its shape for years.”
The sewing rooms
Cut-and-sew happens fifteen minutes away, in a plant of about seventy machinists. It is bright, loud with radio, and runs a single day shift — no nights, no piece-rate. Most of the machinists have been there over ten years; several sewed our very first production run and still recognise the styles as they evolve season to season.
The details we are fussiest about happen here: the taped shoulder seams that stop a tee stretching when you pull it over your head, the twin-needle hems, the collar that is cut on the fold rather than pieced. None of it is visible on a hanger. All of it is visible after a year of wear.
What we check, and how often
We visit at least three times a year, and not by appointment-only theatre: order sizes like ours don’t warrant a rehearsed tour. Both factories are independently audited — the sewing plant holds SMETA certification — but honestly, the best audit is a long relationship. When you have worked with the same people for six years, problems surface in conversation long before they would surface in a checklist.
We publish the region and nature of every factory we use, and we will name them fully as those relationships mature. What we won’t do is claim a level of oversight we don’t have. We are a small brand with a short, visitable supply chain — that is the honest extent of it, and it is quite a lot.