Since 2019 · Halifax → everywhere
We make few things. That's the entire strategy.
Field & Crest is what happens when two people who repair their own clothes start a clothing company. Eleven styles, three named factories, one promise: it lasts, or we fix it.
The name on the label
Field, meet Crest
Ada Field spent nine years as a pattern-maker for brands whose names you'd know, watching good designs die by cost-engineering: one fewer bar-tack here, a lighter zip there, until the jacket that tested beautifully arrived in stores as something else. Sam Crest ran a sailmaker's loft in Halifax and had the opposite problem: everything he made was over-built, and nobody ever saw it twice.
They met, predictably, over a repair: Ada brought in a waxed jacket with a torn shoulder seam that three tailors had refused. Sam fixed it with sail thread. The argument that followed, about why clothing isn't built like sails, lasted four hours and, in a sense, hasn't stopped. Field & Crest is that argument with a payroll.
The rules they wrote in the garage in 2019 are still on the wall: make few things. Test them until they're boring. Name everyone who makes them. Fix what breaks, free, forever. And never, ever chase a trend down a hill it's already rolling down.
Seven years, six milestones
How we got here
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2019
Four hundred tees
Ada Field and Sam Crest rent a Halifax garage, cut one pattern, and sell the first run of 400 heavyweight tees from a folding table at the farmers' market. 62 come back for repairs over the years. All 62 get fixed.
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2020
Fall Harbour
Production moves twenty minutes down the coast to the Fall Harbour Workroom in Lunenburg. It still cuts and sews half the line, and the first name on the factory list.
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2021
Wovens learn to travel
Coats and linen need looms we don't have. After eleven factory visits in three countries, Braga Stitchworks in Portugal gets the tailoring, and a page on our website.
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2022
The repair promise
Knitwear joins via the worker-owned Karnataka Knit Co-op, and we put the sentence on every product page: repairs are free for the life of the garment. Legal said maybe don't. We did.
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2024
Plastic leaves the building
Every order ships in paper, cellulose, and regret-free tape. The last poly mailer in the studio is framed above the packing bench as a warning.
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2026
Home, quietly
Shirting offcuts become the first Field & Crest Home pieces: washed-linen cushion covers. The plan is the same as 2019: make few things, make them well, name everyone involved.
The garage rules
What we refuse to compromise
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Fewer, better
Eleven styles is the whole store. Every pattern survives a hundred logged wears before it earns a price tag, and anything that doesn't get worn on repeat gets cut from the line, not marked down forever.
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Named and known
Three factories make everything we sell. Their names, cities, and specialities are public, their wages are audited above local living-wage benchmarks, and we visit every one, every year.
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Repair first
The greenest garment is the one still being worn. Repairs are free for life, re-wax kits ship free, and the journal teaches you to fix what we can't reach.
The receipts are public.
Factory list, fibre index, repair counts: the sustainability page is the long version of everything above.