Every MAY suit is cut and sewn by a partner workshop in Vietnam. Here is who they are, what we ask of them, and how we work together.
Hoi An has more tailors per street than most European capitals have in a district.
The town was a trading port long before it was a tailoring town — silk, cotton and wool moved through it for centuries. The workshops that remain today inherited both the materials and the habits: patterns drafted by hand, canvassed fronts, finishing done at a bench rather than on a line.
What those ateliers rarely have is visibility. Their order flow rises and falls with tourism, which means their year is decided by something entirely outside their control. A steady stream of online orders is what changes that — and it is the part of the equation MAY takes on.
We work with a deliberately small number of workshops. Small enough that we know the person cutting your jacket, and that a remark about a shoulder reaches them the same week.
A family-run workshop in the historic tailoring quarter, cutting suits for over forty years. Two generations work side by side at the same bench — patterns are drafted by hand, and the finishing that matters is done by the person who cut the cloth.
A modern atelier joining traditional construction with contemporary equipment. We are finishing our trial orders with them before opening them to the configurator — no workshop takes a customer order until the sample suits satisfy us.
We are still writing the full profiles of our partner ateliers — portraits, workshop visits and the stories of the master tailors will be published here as they are ready.
Canvassed fronts rather than fused, seams that can be let out, linings that can be opened. A suit that cannot be altered is not a bespoke suit.
The workshop has to produce a garment from figures on a page, without the customer in the room. That is a different discipline from measuring someone at the counter.
We pay per garment at a rate agreed with the workshop, not driven down by volume. Higher margins for them is the whole point of removing the middlemen.
One beautiful suit proves talent; twenty identical ones prove a process. We order repeatedly from the same specification before a workshop goes live.
We do not source ateliers from a directory. Every partnership starts on site, and none opens to customers until the sample suits pass.
We visit the workshop, look at work in progress, and order sample suits at our own expense against the specifications we would send a real order.
Measurements, construction details and finishing standards are written down in a single spec, translated locally, so nothing depends on a good day or a good memory.
Our contact in Vietnam relays every order and every remark back to the bench. Feedback from a finished suit reaches the tailor who made it.
Design your suit and it goes to a bench in Hoi An, not to a factory line.
