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 — the partnership that 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.