Before Penna ever had a product, we had a fabric brief.
A common way to develop apparel is to start at the mill's catalog. You pick a fabric that already exists, design around its properties, and get to market within months. There is nothing wrong with this, and most of the clothing in the world is made this way, including most of the clothing sold to care professionals.
We spent our first months in those catalogs. We were looking for a fabric that could hold its structure with constant movement and industrial laundering, stay comfortable against the skin for twelve plus hours, and still maintain an elegant drape. Something you would actually choose to wear. Plenty of fabrics did some of this. None did all of it, because none had been developed with this particular job as the brief.
So we took the slower road. The brief came first, and the fabric was built to it:
DiamondFlow, the jacquard-backed double knit our first collection is made from, took several months of development before a single garment was designed on it.
The Slow Road
The obvious cost is time. Fabric development runs in cycles of knitting, testing, and revising, each one taking weeks, and in the months we spent on a single fabric a brand working from a catalog could have shipped two or three collections. Fabric mills have minimums, which means committing real capital to material long before a single sellable product exists, and for a company our size that's a bet.
But a fabric developed against a specific brief behaves differently from one adapted to it after the fact. Movement doesn't fight the garment, because the fabric was built around movement. The same goes for laundering...it was designed in from the start, and so was the feel against your skin. The outer face and the inner face were developed together, each with their own job. The full story of how the fabric manages this is here.
There's a longer-term play as well. A material improves in a way a product line never can,
because every future piece built on DiamondFlow starts from a base that already solves the hard problems, and every improvement to the fabric reaches everything made from it going forward.