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"Studio Visit: The Knitwear Designers of Orley\nWe talked with Samantha Florence and the Orley brothers about the challenges of running a family business, the difference between youthful and young, and why, unlike many of their peers, they don't wear black.\nHow did Orley get started?\n\n Matthew: We're family. Alex and I are brothers. Sam and I are soon to be married. This was a family company before we even started it.\n\n Alex: It's been a long journey that's only come to fruition in the last couple years. But this has been something\u2014even before we worked in fashion\u2014that Matt and I had talked about for a long time, from a very young age. Sam also has a deep family history in fashion too. Her grandparents had a department store.\n\n Samantha: It was the equivalent of a Bergdorf Goodman in Toronto, called Creed's.\nAlex: In 2011, the timing just felt right. We had been working on things in a really piecemeal fashion and finally decided to pull the trigger and do it.\n\n Matthew: When we came out of the gate in January 2012, our work was really focused and on a small scale. It was centered around knits, which is the DNA of the brand. They were all Italian-made, and we were able to say a lot in just a few pieces.\nWhy did you decide to focus on knits?\n\n Alex: Knits are really tactile, so it's easy to stake your claim in terms of quality. If you pick up a knit, you know immediately what the quality is without looking at the price tag. And also the difficulty of it. Knits are a really hard category to get into. A lot of brands spend time growing before they even launch knitwear. It was important to be able to show our technical skill in a small capsule collection, to show the quality and design we stand for. And with knits, you're not just designing with fabrics, you're actually designing the fabric itself, every aspect of it.\n\n Samantha: Also, knits are so versatile. You can do anything from a polo to outerwear to pants to ties and gloves. We were able to show a wide range of product in just three seasons.\nTell us about your design process.\n\n Alex: What sets us apart from other brands is that our seasonal concepts tend to be an ongoing story. Our mood board is constantly evolving. At the end of the season, we'll have a freeze-frame of what the inspiration was for a collection, but it bleeds into the next collection. It's not like we have a new clean start for every collection. There's this ongoing, larger brand narrative that's important to what we're doing.\n\n Matthew: In that sense, it's clear there's a defined Orley aesthetic. You can see it when you're looking at all of our collections as a whole, because they aren't disjointed.\nDescribe the Orley guy.\n\n Alex: He's not constrained by an age. We find that our customers span a huge age spectrum. It's generally a personality that unifies our guy. He's youthful at every age but isn't necessarily young. He can be a teenager. He can also be 60 years old but have a youthful energy. He's not afraid of color or texture or a really special product. Our guy appreciates quality and is willing to invest in a quality piece.\nWhere do you see your brand in five years?\n\n Alex: In the Orley boutique on Madison Avenue. Our goal is to keep growing and keep building, and retail is definitely going to be a part of that.\n\n Matthew: While we have a full ready-to-wear collection, there is so much more we can do with it. We want to keep expanding within the menswear world, because there's still a lot that has yet to be explored.\nWhat have been some of the biggest obstacles in growing Orley?\n\n Alex: Working with family.\n\n  Samantha: That might be the biggest obstacle, but it's also our biggest asset. We can be completely honest with one another and really put our thoughts and ideas out there. No matter what happens, we're coming back the next day. We've figured out how to work well together.\nHow do you spend your free time?\n\n Matthew: We put a lot of effort into separating our home life and work life. We try to have lives outside this 278-square-foot office.\n\n Alex: We love to travel. I think all of us get restless if we're in one place too long. Travel is a big benefit of doing what we do, and it's something we love. We also all have fairly voracious cultural appetites, and I think those interests come through in the collections as well.\nYou're known for designing in a colorful palette. Why is that?\n\n Alex: We're not eschewing anything, we're just being really true to who we are. It's a way of embracing our identity. Matt and I don't wear black. It's not a rule that we have, it's just a personal preference. When we start designing, we always ask if we should include black, and then we say no. In a lot of ways, we are our customer. That's an important aspect of what we do. If the product doesn't feel right for us, it generally won't be right outside the office."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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