Elena Reyes
Co-founder & Creative Director
Twelve years in menswear pattern-making before starting the tailoring shop that became North & Noble.
Since 2016
A small line, refined every year
We are a fourteen-person team in Portland, Oregon making the clothes we could not find anywhere else.
Our story
It started with a shirt that fell apart
In 2016 our founders, Elena Reyes and Tom Kessler, were running a small tailoring shop off NW Glisan Street. Customers kept bringing in the same problem: new clothes that failed within a season — thin seams, fused collars, fabric that pilled after three washes.
Rather than keep repairing them, we made our own. One oxford shirt, one hundred units, sold from the shop counter. It sold out in nine days, and people came back asking what else we made.
"We would rather make eight things properly than eight hundred things quickly."
Ten years later the answer is still deliberately short: a core line of essentials, produced in small repeated runs with twelve partner factories we visit in person, priced so the math is obvious.
What we hold to
Three non-negotiables
Made to last
Long-staple fibers, reinforced stress points, and a wear-test program that runs each garment through 40 wash cycles before it ships.
Ethical factories
Twelve partners across Portugal, Japan and North Carolina. We publish every facility, audit annually and pay above the local living wage.
Fair pricing
A flat 2.4× markup instead of the industry's 5–8×. No fake sales, no inflated compare-at prices, no seasonal panic discounting.
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Customers served
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Average rating
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Partner factories
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Waste target by 2030
The people
Who makes this
Tom Kessler
Co-founder & Head of Production
Spends roughly a third of the year on factory floors in Porto, Okayama and Charlotte.
Amara Osei
Materials Lead
Sources every fiber we use and runs the 40-wash durability program that decides what ships.
Ready when you are
Start with one good shirt
Free shipping over $75, 30-day returns, and a repair service for anything that wears out early.