A133 | Our Autumn Collection Is Here — and Here Is the Story Behind How We Made It

Every year around this time, there is a day in our Xiamen studio when the new seasonal sample book comes together. It is not a formal occasion — no presentation, no meeting room, no agenda. Someone puts the finished samples out on the long table in the design room, and people start drifting in. The weavers come to see what the designers did with the colours they spent months matching. The sales team comes to see what they will be talking about for the next six months. Mr. Chen, our general manager, usually arrives last, stands at the edge, and does not say anything for a while.

This year that moment happened on a Tuesday morning, and we want to tell you about the collection it produced — but also about how it got made, because the story behind a seasonal collection is, we think, at least as interesting as the collection itself.

Where the Colours Came From

Our colour direction this autumn started, as it often does, with something that had nothing to do with ribbons. Our lead designer, Mei, keeps a running collection of photographs on her phone — not styled images, but things she notices in passing. The photo that became the anchor for this season was one she took last November in a park in Xiamen: a close-up of fallen leaves on wet stone. Deep rust, a faded terracotta, the particular green of a leaf that is not quite dead, all against dark grey.

She did not know at the time that it would be the foundation of a seasonal palette. It went into her phone and stayed there. In March, when the design team began working on the autumn collection, she pulled it out and put it next to the colour work they had been doing, and the connection was immediate. The palette that became our Autumn 2026 collection — rust, terracotta, forest green, and warm champagne — traces back, in a direct line, to that photograph of leaves on wet stone.

We like this story for what it says about how design actually works: not from a brief or a trend report, but from attention. From someone who looks at things carefully and keeps what she finds.

The Technical Challenges — and One Stubborn Colour

The rust was straightforward. It is a well-understood dyeing colour with good uptake on polyester, and our dye technicians had it matched to Mei's reference within two rounds. The terracotta was slightly more difficult because it sits in a range where small formula variations produce meaningfully different results — too warm and it becomes orange, too neutral and it loses the earthiness that made it interesting. We went through four rounds on the terracotta.

The colour that caused us the most trouble was the forest green. Not because green is technically difficult — it is not — but because the forest green in Mei's original photograph was not actually a green. It was a very dark, slightly desaturated olive with a warm undertone. Matching "green" to a formula is easy. Matching that specific quality of green, which reads differently under artificial light than under natural light, took six rounds and a conversation between our dye team and Mei about what she was actually seeing in the photograph versus what the test swatches were showing.

The six-round conversation is the part of this process that most people outside manufacturing do not see, and that we think deserves more credit. It is a form of translation — between a visual impression and a chemical formula, between what a designer sees and what a dye technician can produce — and it requires both parties to communicate with more precision than usual. By the end of it, both Mei and our lead dye technician had a clearer shared understanding of the colour than either of them had at the start.

The Materials

This autumn we are offering the collection across three material bases: double-faced satin, wide velvet, and a new mid-weight cotton-feel grosgrain that we have been developing for the past year. The cotton-feel grosgrain is the one we are most excited about. It has the structure of grosgrain but a surface that reads as natural fibre — warmer to the touch, slightly matte, with a texture that photographs well under natural light. It is made from polyester, which gives it the colour consistency and durability that natural cotton cannot match, but it behaves in ways that cotton-feel buyers will recognise immediately.

We are offering it in the full Autumn palette plus black and ivory. We expect it to be particularly popular with artisan brands in the food, wellness, and home categories, where the aesthetic of natural materials is important but the practical requirements of packaging durability are also non-negotiable.

What Happens After the Sample Book Day

After that Tuesday morning in the design room — after people had touched the samples and asked their questions and eventually drifted back to their other work — the collection moved into production planning. Colour formulas were locked into our archive, where they will be held for the life of the collection so that any order placed six months from now can be matched exactly to an order placed today. Production schedules were set. The samples were photographed for our catalogue.

And then we started talking to clients, which is the best part of launching a collection — hearing what people will do with it. We have already had conversations about rust velvet for holiday hampers, terracotta grosgrain for autumn wedding favours, and champagne satin for a fragrance brand's seasonal packaging. Each of those conversations is a small version of the original design conversation: someone showing us what they see, and us finding a way to make it real.

If you would like to see the collection — as physical samples, not just photographs — please get in touch and we will send a swatch set. We think the cotton-feel grosgrain in particular needs to be held to be fully understood. We are proud of it, and we hope you will find something in the palette that works for what you are making this autumn.