Freenote Cloth

Matt and Andrew Brodrick did not start in clothing the way most denim founders do, by obsessing over a single perfect pair of jeans. They started in the business of surf and skate, where they spent the better part of a decade learning how a brand actually gets made and sold. They grew up surfing, first in Florida and then in Southern California, and in two thousand three they both landed at Electric, the eyewear and accessories company that grew fast enough to be bought by Volcom in two thousand eight. For ten years they helped build someone else’s label. Then they left to build their own, and they decided it would make the kind of clothes that take a beating happily and look better for it.

The Brothers Who Left the Surf Industry

The two brothers came at the trade from opposite ends, which is part of why it worked. Matt ran the numbers first, as Electric’s director of finance through the years leading up to the Volcom sale, then changed lanes entirely and became the brand’s director of apparel and accessories, designing and producing bags, luggage, button-downs, and jackets. Andrew was on the road, managing East Coast sales and opening accounts with department stores, boutiques, and sporting-goods shops, until he was promoted to director of North American sales, overseeing a staff, dozens of outside reps, and nineteen territories. Between them they had seen a garment from sketch to spreadsheet to sales floor. By two thousand thirteen they had seen enough of the surf, skate, and snow world and wanted to do their own thing.

What they wanted was a rebuke to disposable fashion. The brothers grew up on the idea, half memory and half ideal, of a closet built from a few high-quality garments worn most days for years, the way explorers, cowboys, and railroad workers wore clothes that had to survive the work. “We just try to make what we at least see ourselves wearing,” Andrew has said. “All those feelings come out in the brand.” They named it Freenote Cloth, launched in two thousand thirteen, and put out their first full collection in the fall of two thousand fourteen.

They wanted a closet built from a few high-quality garments worn most days for years, the way cowboys and railroad workers wore clothes that had to survive the work.

Denim First, Then Everything Around It

The spark was not a single viral product so much as a position: real American-made heritage menswear at a moment when the racks were full of brands chasing the same look. Denim led the way. The anchor was the Rios, a slim-straight cut the brothers describe as their original and most universal fit, the jean that works on almost everyone and that the rest of the line grew out from. It arrived into a crowded field of reproduction labels, and Freenote’s argument was geographic as much as anything. “All these brands are trying to do it,” Andrew said of the heritage boom, “but they’re from everywhere else but here.” Freenote was from here, and it made its clothes here.

The jeans carried the small obsessive details that the raw-denim world reads like a signature: button flies, two-piece waistbands, tucked belt loops, flat-felled seams, Japanese herringbone pocket bags, custom rivets and button tacks, and a leather patch from a domestic tannery. They were never the cheapest jeans on the shelf. As the brand put it early on, its garments may not cost as little as some of the crowdfunded ones, because the point was a story that outpaces its counterparts, not a price that undercuts them.

A Fit for Every Landmark

One jean became a wall of them, and the brothers named the fits after the country around their office. The Rios slim-straight was joined by the Avila slim-taper, the Portola classic taper, the Trabuco straight, the Modesto, the Wilkes western, and the Belford, a buckle-back vintage cut named for an eighteen-nineties cannery. Each one is offered across a run of weights and fabrics, from a light twelve-ounce vintage blue up to a punishing twenty-ounce raw, in indigo, brown, black, and ecru. A buyer can find a Freenote jean for almost any body and almost any taste in fade.

Denim was the foundation, not the ceiling. The line compounded outward into the rest of a classic American wardrobe: denim and waxed-canvas jackets, flannel and chambray wovens, heavyweight knits and pocket tees, leather goods. The brothers drew on the same well of references they always had, vintage workwear and rock and roll and the odd film character, citing the likes of Bob the Butcher from Gangs of New York and Bob Morales from La Bamba as the sort of men they were dressing. In time Freenote opened a brick-and-mortar shop in Highland Park, Los Angeles, a second front to the San Juan Capistrano home base.

One jean became a wall of them, and the brothers named the fits after the country around their office.

San Juan Capistrano, On Purpose

The hard part of Freenote is not a single near-death moment; it is the daily discipline of making clothes in America without owning a factory. Production happens in Los Angeles, spread across a rotating set of contract sewing houses. “We have at any given time, four, five, six different manufacturing houses making our goods,” Andrew has said. “Some are by the office, some are up here, so we’re always ping-ponging around.” Running quality across half a dozen shops, in a country that spent decades dismantling its garment trade, is the kind of grind that does not photograph well but decides whether a small brand survives.

The brothers also made a choice that, by their own admission, did not make business sense. Their production is in Los Angeles, but they keep the company itself in San Juan Capistrano, in the historic Los Rios district, the oldest residential street in California, next door to a Spanish mission from the seventeen hundreds. “In reality we probably should be set up in Los Angeles,” Matt has admitted, “but we won’t.” Andrew puts it as a matter of identity: “It’s more cowboy than it is metropolitan, so we always wanted that in the brand.” The same instinct shows up in how Andrew talks about the competition, which is to say he refuses to. “You see brands that we compete with. It’s like they’re fighting for crumbs,” he has said. “Dude, live and let live. What’s the point?”

Made Here, Woven Mostly There

Freenote is plain about the line between where its clothes are sewn and where its cloth is woven. Every garment is cut, sewn, and finished in the United States, in those Los Angeles sewing houses, with the design and direction coming out of San Juan Capistrano. The denim itself comes mostly from Japan. The brothers built the line on custom selvedge developed with Japanese mills, principally Kuroki, along with Kaihara and Yoshiwa, and in the early years they also wove on Cone Mills cloth from Greensboro, North Carolina, before that American mill closed. The trims travel too: custom labels from Italy, Japanese pocket bags, a leather patch from a domestic tannery. The cotton’s farm origin is not something the brand publishes, so we leave it unmarked.

The Country It Comes From

The heritage Freenote draws on is partly inherited and partly underfoot. The Los Rios district the brothers chose for the office is rancho-era California made physical, a street of adobe homes beside a mission, surrounded by old saloons, working ranches, and the beach, a few miles from where the brothers learned to surf. The denim fits carry the names of the canyons and towns and the cannery nearby, so the map of Southern California is sewn into the labels. Behind that sits the larger lineage every serious American denim maker is rebuilding: the workwear tradition of clothes made to be worn hard and kept, and the domestic cut-and-sew trade that nearly disappeared and that brands like Freenote keep alive one Los Angeles sewing house at a time.

The Bottom Line