There was no career plan, no polished business plan before JaOcCo. There was one specific moment: I was in the middle of a burnout, and the company I worked for closed. Both at once. And I decided it was time to try something else.
I was co-director of that company — there were three of us at that level, with a CEO above us. That role had given me a lot, but it had also emptied me out. What I was looking for wasn't just another job — it was a way of working that wouldn't make me relive the same thing.
Why made-to-order, specifically
Two things mattered to me starting from zero. First: I didn't want to create surplus, waste — cotton produced only to end up in the trash because a sales forecast was wrong. Producing only what's ordered answered that directly. Second: I wanted to transmit something — messages, my way of thinking — through t-shirts. Not sell clothes just to sell clothes.
Those two ideas never really moved since. Everything else — the designs, the certifications, how the site is built — came after, to serve that.
What I didn't know yet
What I didn't gauge at the start was how much launching a brand alone, without being a designer, without being a marketing specialist, would be a constant learning curve — and how hard it would stay, long after launch. I'll come back to that in other posts here. But the starting point remains that one: a burnout, a door closing, and the decision to open another one instead of looking for an identical one.
Designed in Switzerland by an independent brand. Small batch — limited to 1,000 pieces worldwide. Made to order to reduce textile waste.