Six people, one cutting table, forty pieces at a time

The name comes from the amber routes — the old trade paths cloth and pigment moved along before any of it was called fashion. It is a reminder that everything we cut arrived here from somewhere, through someone's hands, and that we owe those hands a name and a fair price.

So we buy directly. Adire from the eleko dyers in Abeokuta, aso-oke from a weaving family in Ilorin, hand-dyed cotton from a small operation in Oshodi. We see the cloth before we buy it, we pay for it on the day, and we tell you on the product page where it came from.

What that buys is constraint. A dyer produces what a dyer produces — we cannot order two hundred metres of something that took three weeks to make by hand. So batches are small, usually twenty-five to forty pieces, and when a batch sells through we retire the pattern rather than reorder cloth that would not be the same cloth anyway.

Six of us work in Ikeja. Nothing is outsourced, nothing is drop-shipped, and every piece that leaves the studio has been finished and pressed by someone whose name is on the wall.