Once you start thinking that way, it changes things you did not expect. Transport, for one.

Like most people, we assumed that driving to a shop must be the greener choice. The research suggests otherwise, at least under the right conditions. Imagine fifty people who each need a new shirt. They get into fifty cars, drive to fifty shops, park, buy, and drive home again. Now imagine those same fifty staying where they are while one van follows a planned route and delivers fifty shirts to fifty doors. The second journey is usually the better one — not because it happens online, but because one vehicle has replaced fifty.

There is a catch. The system works because it has time to work. The moment speed becomes the priority, most of the advantage disappears. If everyone wants tomorrow, there is no time to fill the van, and several half-empty vehicles end up driving the same roads. Faster, but not better.

So whenever the choice is yours, we would suggest standard delivery. An extra day or two lets carriers consolidate, fill their vehicles properly and make each journey count. A small decision, multiplied by thousands.

What stayed with us was not the lesson about transport, though. It was the lesson about patience, because the same principle applies to everything that happens after the shirt arrives.

A surprising number of garments are replaced long before they are worn out. They stop feeling new. A sleeve is a little too long, a waistband a little loose, a button gone, a cuff beginning to fray. None of that means a garment has reached the end of its life. For generations, buying clothes and visiting a tailor were the same errand — a waistband taken in by a few centimetres, sleeves shortened, hems adjusted. We still receive emails asking whether a pair of trousers can be altered by two or three centimetres, as though it were surgery. Any good tailor would smile at the question. Those small adjustments are often all that stand between a garment being forgotten and another ten years of wear.

Care works the same way. Most clothes need washing far less often than we think. They do better with fresh air, with lower temperatures, with drying naturally. They do better for not being rushed. Which is perhaps what we have been circling all along. Not sustainability. Time — the time flax takes to grow, the time a cloth takes to weave properly, the time it takes to fill a van before it leaves, the time it takes for a collar to mould itself to the person wearing it.

So, a few suggestions, if we can only offer a few. Choose standard delivery where you can. Combine purchases rather than placing several small orders. If you are unsure about sizing, write to us before you order; we would always rather answer a question than send parcels back and forth across Europe. Find yourself a good tailor. And when you buy something new, the question is not whether you will enjoy it next month. It is whether you will still be reaching for it in ten years.

There is one last thing, and it is the thing a shirt brand is not supposed to write. The most sustainable purchase is often the one you never make. If the shirt already hanging in your wardrobe still serves you well, keep wearing it. But life changes, we change, and sometimes there is a genuine reason to buy something new. There is no need to feel guilty about it. We only hope that when the moment comes, you choose slowly, choose well, and choose something you actually want to live with.

Sustainability is not something that can be stitched into a garment. It begins afterwards, the first time the shirt is worn and every time after that, until one day it comes back from the tailor with shorter sleeves and you cannot quite remember buying it.