The Source
Issue 001

I disappeared for a while.

Not because I ran out of things to say.
Because I was building the thing I needed when I was running a brand from 8,000 miles away.

For more than ten years, I’ve been trying to teach myself everything about the apparel industry.

Textile textbooks.
Trade shows across Europe and the US.
Factories in the USA, Portugal, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, India.
Countless flights.
Countless conversations with designers, developers, and founders trying to make great product inside a system that was not built for them.

I kept asking the same questions.

Why does it take 18 to 24 months to launch a product that takes 25 minutes to sew?
Why do you have to order 1,200 units before you even know if something will sell?
Why does innovation get squeezed out the moment a brand tries to scale?
Why does product creation feel so fragmented, slow, and opaque?

For years, I tried to optimize inside the existing model.

Eventually, that stopped making sense.

Premium retail is moving in one direction.

High mix, low volume.

Smaller initial runs.
More SKUs.
Faster feedback.
Tighter decision loops.
Fewer irreversible bets.

Not because it sounds good in a deck.
Because it matches how customers actually behave now.

Demand is fragmented.
Attention shifts fast.
And discounting is where premium brands quietly die.

Most brands think their biggest sourcing problem is cost.

It isn’t.

The real problem is commitment timing.

If your supply chain forces you to be right six months before you have real signal, you are gambling with cash.

The bill shows up later as:
excess inventory
markdowns
stockouts on winners
missed launch windows
and founders spending their time managing production instead of building the business

Gap spent decades getting good at one thing: buying cheap.

Zara spent decades getting good at something else: being wrong cheaply.

One model requires you to commit early, buy big, and hope demand cooperates.
The other lets you place small bets, read real sales, and reorder winners fast.

This is the part most people miss.

Brands that look “expensive” on a per-unit basis often make more money because they don’t fund margin through discounting.

Cheap product isn’t the goal.
Fewer wrong bets is the goal.

Out-of-stock is the most expensive cost that never hits your P&L.
You never record the sale, so you never see the loss.

And when brands overbuy to avoid stockouts, they pay for it later through markdowns and dead cash.

That’s why the old model keeps breaking.

Big MOQs.
Long lead times.
Single-region dependence.
Rigid factory relationships.

It was built for stable demand and slow change.

That world is gone.

A few trips to Guangzhou changed how I think about lead time.

Not because sewing is magically faster.
A shirt still takes minutes.

Because the decision loop is faster.

I watched a system built around tiny initial orders and constant replenishment based on what sold yesterday. Not forecasts. Not planning meetings. Sales.

Orders measured in the hundreds.
Reorders placed daily.
Inventory that never had time to rot.

It’s hard to unsee that.

And no, this isn’t an endorsement of fast fashion ethics or low-quality product. That’s a different conversation.

The insight is structural.

Test small. Learn fast. Scale winners.

That operating principle is real.

If you can apply it with premium materials, real quality control, and a disciplined product vision, you get the upside without turning your brand into a parody.

In January 2025, we picked up our family and moved to Vietnam.

Not for lifestyle.
Not for cheap labor.
And not because Vietnam is “the answer.”

Because I needed to be close enough to rebuild the system from the ground up.

What started as survival for Western Rise turned into something bigger.

UNCVRD.

UNCVRD is not a factory.

It’s a product creation operating system designed for high mix, low volume brands.

We act as the operating layer between brands and production so founders do not have to:
build an Asia office
manage five vendors across ten WhatsApp threads
guess what is approved and what is not
find out something went wrong after it ships

We run the work the way it has to run if you want speed without chaos.

Clear inputs.
Short decision loops.
Version control.
Timelines that mean something.
Factories chosen for the product, not convenience.

Here’s what I strongly believe now.

Premium brands should never be limited by one factory or one region.

Not because diversification sounds smart.
Because single points of failure are no longer theoretical.

An asset-light sourcing model creates optionality.

It allows brands to:
respond faster to market changes
reduce single-region risk
expand into new categories without technical gaps
keep inventory cleaner and cost control tighter

These advantages compound.

Not in a slide deck sense.
In a cash flow sense.
In a founder sleep sense.

Most people think speed is a factory problem.

In practice, the real choke point is usually materials.

Fabric minimums.
Long material lead times.
Limited access to premium, in-stock options.

Those constraints force brands into bad decisions before production even starts.

Once that constraint is removed, everything changes.

You can test ideas fast.
Kill them fast.
And when something works, reorder and scale without starting from zero.

No months waiting on fabric.
No forcing ten styles onto one material just to hit minimums.
No quiet death of innovation before it ever reaches a customer.

This used to be called Ownership.

It’s now called The Source, because that’s where the truth is.

The source is where timelines become real.
Where costs stop being theoretical.
Where quality is either engineered or left to chance.

This is where premium brands actually win or lose.

If you’re building a brand and the product side always feels slower, messier, and riskier than it should be, you’re not imagining it.

The system was built that way.

UNCVRD is my attempt to fix it from the inside.

More from the source soon.

Will