We make a small number of things properly
Northline started in 2019 because we could not find a plain t-shirt that survived a year. Everything we sell now exists to solve some version of that problem.
How we got here
We spent our first two years running the standard schedule: four collections a year, each one a fresh gamble on what people might want in six months. It was exhausting and it produced a lot of stock nobody asked for. In 2022 we stopped, cut the range to a core set we keep in stock permanently, and started adding a piece only when it was actually ready.
That decision shapes most of what follows. Fewer designs means bigger fabric runs, which brings the unit cost down. It also means the tee you liked in March is still available in October, in the same fabric, in the same fit.
Where things are made
Knitting and dyeing happen at one family-run mill in northern Portugal. We use a single mill on purpose: spreading production around would be cheaper and would also mean we could not keep proper track of any of it. Our cotton is organic, sourced through two spinners in Portugal and Turkey, and our dyes are OEKO-TEX certified with water treated on site.
We do not have full visibility of the individual farms our raw fibre comes from, because organic cotton gets aggregated at the gin before it reaches a spinner. That is normal across the industry and it is still a gap, so we would rather say so than imply we have solved it. We have written about this in more detail.
What we will and will not do
We will repair things
Send back anything of ours that has failed and we will fix what can be fixed, and tell you plainly when something is finished.
We will not run flash sales
Discounting on a countdown timer trains everyone to wait. We would rather price things correctly the first time.
We will take it back
Sixty days, worn or washed. Buying clothes by post is genuinely difficult and the risk should sit with us.
Who we are
Six people, working out of a converted unit in Leeds. Two of us handle design and fabric, two handle orders and returns, one keeps the website upright, and one spends most of the year talking to the mill. There is no marketing department, which is why this page is written the way it is.