#jamesnord

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spring suiting

Too often, I feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of notifications, messages, products, and in general noise that I’m bombarded with day in and day out. Your phone is old and outdated before its first scratch, your clothes are out of style before you wear them in, and your car is slow before its first tune up. Keeping up is exhausting, and giving into this game too often takes our attention away from the things that truly matter, like investing in memorable experiences with people you care about.  I say all this as one of the principles of OLIVERS, a new apparel brand from San Francisco, because I believe we are doing things differently. Rather than design collections based on trends and fads, we are thoughtfully developing sportswear essentials. Our products are based on the iconic staples that every active man keeps in his closet, only our versions are elevated for modern performance using the best technical materials and components, tailored fits, and simple, clean designs that will last as long as the garment.  So far, we’ve brought the gym short into the 21-century with one of the most succcessful apparel Kickstarter campaigns in history. We’ve re-imagined the cotton boxer brief using a performance fabric originally developed for the Swiss military, and today, we’re releasing our third product, a new take on the old school hoodie.  The word hoodie comes with a load of connotation. For some, images of Zuckerburg and the tech elite come to mind, or the images of the gangsters that hollywood popularized in the 80′s and 90′s, or maybe you think of high school athletes standing on the sidelines. For everything the hoodie has become, it is a long way from where is started some 80 years ago. 

Back then, a new sweater mill needed a solution to keep men working in cold forests and refrigerated meat lockers warmer than their current sweatshirts could. The little sweater mill devised a simple solution. They added a thick hood that could be pulled over the head to keep workers warm, or taken down as things heated up. It’s a basic technical innovation that created an icon, the hooded sweatshirt. That sweater mill, Champion Products, remains today one of the first names in classic american sportswear. And since Champions’ first version, the classic has been made over and over again, in every style, color, and material, but for too long its design and construction have remained relatively unchanged. We’ve decided to approach the hoodie with the same spirit that Champion had 80 years ago, by asking, “how can we provide better solutions for the men that wear this product.”