WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE WITH STORY MFG.

We met up with Story mfg. founders Saeed and Katy Al-Rubeyi in the label's London studio to discuss their slow-moving design process, why they’ll never fit into the fashion calendar, and the exclusive capsule they’ve built for END. from offcuts.

Founded in 2013 by husband-and-wife duo Saeed and Katy Al-Rubeyi, Story mfg. has spent over a decade making clothing at the pace of the natural world rather than the fashion calendar. Built around natural dyeing, hand-led processes and natural fibres, it’s a brand that has always been more interested in how something is made than how quickly it can get to market.

Fabrics are woven for each collection rather than bought off the roll, prints are carved by hand into wooden blocks, and colour comes from bark, root, fruit, flower, and mineral rather than a chemical bath. Waste is treated with the same seriousness as the product itself — anything too small to cut into a garment is pulped and turned into the paper used for hang tags, and anything big enough becomes… Well, an exclusive END. capsule collection. The result is a range that proudly carries the evidence of the maker’s hand all over it and is designed to keep changing long after you’ve bought it.

For its latest project, Story mfg. has created an exclusive capsule for END. built almost entirely from scraps, offcuts, and deadstock pulled from their archive. We headed to the brand’s London studio to talk to Saeed and Katy about perpetual soup, being called hippies, and why they’d rather teach you to mend a hole than sell you a replacement.

For those who don’t already know the brand, can you sum up Story mfg. in three words?

Comfortable, craft, natural.

Can you talk us through the design process — what’s the starting point?

Have you heard of that concept of perpetual soup? Where there’s a soup that’s being made constantly. That’s us. It’s really hard for us to work out what a starting point even is, because the starting point is so often our old stuff. Sometimes it’s a new type of natural dye or a new process, and that becomes a starting point. There are a lot of different starting points, and because the collections are quite big, there’ll be different starting points across a single collection.

The way we tackle it is to look back through old seasons and go, “Oh, I really love that still,” or “That’s got room for more development.” So we’ll go through all the old stuff, and put those pieces up on a board. We also both look at what we’re individually into. Saeed’s into bikes at the moment, so he’ll be looking at how that weaves into the collection. On the other hand, we always look at vintage. Bits in our own archive that we still like, images we find, old books, that sort of thing. And then there’s the natural dye: has the dye house done something new that they want to share with us, or is there something we’ve been developing that we’ve never done before? We collate all of that together and then divide it into themes.

From there, we build out a range and sense check it. Have we got enough jackets, enough trousers, enough dresses? And a lot of it is asking, will we actually wear it? That’s a very key part. Then we hand over to our team, who do the first round of CADs and sketches, and we all come together and go, “Yes, let’s add this, let’s tweak that.” We always develop the fabrics because we weave them all, and the prints too, because we mostly use block prints so every one has to be hand-carved. Then there are obviously lots of check-in stages, and the final stage is that all the samples get sent here and we do a massive review and try it all on. That’s the best bit.

As a brand, Story mfg. goes against so much of how the fashion industry typically operates. Where do you find inspiration when you’re doing something so different to your peers?

I don’t think we’re counterculture. Maybe we just counter what normal fashion culture is like on the business side—shows, presentations, press, all those things that go along with it—because it doesn’t really serve us. It’s also kind of boring. We’re not trying to be different for the sake of it, because that’s really cheesy. We’re just trying to make nice clothing in an interesting way.

We’re not trying to be difficult either, but the stuff we make is just different because it takes so long. We couldn’t fit in even if we wanted to. The way we make things is closer to how a cheesemaker makes cheese or a winemaker makes wine—we’re talking about farming, natural dyeing, natural materials. Our stuff is so differently made to anything else we know of in fashion, and we like it that way.

How does this capsule differ from the rest of the collection?

The capsule we designed for END. differs largely in that most of the appliqué fabrics are scraps—scraps from our production, offcuts, deadstock fabrics. When we were talking about how we design, a lot of the time we have boards that are just full of unfinished business, and this was one of them.

We’ve had bags of this stuff since the very beginning of Story mfg., plus a warehouse full of offcuts, because when you cut a shirt or any kind of garment there are always scraps left over in the negative space. Anything too small we turn into paper and make hang tags out of, but anything larger we keep, and we’ve been looking for a project to use those scraps for.

Phrases like “love is work” and “tree hugger” come up again and again across your collections. Where do those come from?

We have a bunch of phrases we use quite a lot through the collections: love is work, work is love made visible, oneness, tree hugger. Tree hugger is because we get called hippies all the time. At the beginning it felt a bit derogatory, and then we thought, there’s nothing demeaning about that. We are tree huggers. We love trees, we love to grow them, we love to work with them. And lots of people feel the same way, so let's embrace it.

What can Story mfg. teach us about how we shop and what we wear?

We get taught all the time by makers and by nature; lessons about slowing down, about changing your expectations, and about valuing the way that things change. Clothing at the moment is made to look the same a thousand days later as it does on the day you buy it, and people have come to expect that and get really precious about it. Whereas natural materials and natural clothing change and adapt and grow with you over time. That’s what Story mfg. stuff does.

Very few brands actively teach their customers how to mend. Why is it so important to you?

We care about helping people prolong the life of their clothing, because our stuff changes over time and you only get to enjoy that change if the garment lasts. If people enjoy it, they’ll shop more with us and they’ll take care of their things. We mend our own stuff anyway, so it feels like an important thing to share. You can do it with non-Story mfg. stuff too. You don’t want to have to get rid of something you love just because it’s got a hole in it or a stain.

So we do mending clubs and give away mending kits sometimes. They feel like a really nice thing to give back—not necessarily the cloth or the needle, but a little bit of knowledge. It’s free, it’s easy, and anyone can do it.

So, there’s something quite deliberate about the fact that a repair always looks like a repair?

We’re getting further and further away from practical skills these days. Not that I’m a super practical person, but I can sew a patch onto something. And the other thing is that it always looks handmade, it’s that thing about the evidence of the hand. You can’t really repair something and have it look box fresh ever, so we lean into it.

There’s a quote from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran: work is love made visible. That applies to a lot of different things, but with clothing, putting a little bit of work into a garment shows that you’ve loved that item. You can literally see that you’ve cared enough to help fix it.