The workshop is more than 50 years old, or rather it is the company that is 50 years old since my grandfather started knitting in 1972 in his garage with his partner. The workshop in which we are today and where Nitto Knitwear sweaters are knitted was born in 1988. At that time, 20 people worked there with 3 knitting shifts per day. They were up to 75 people in total in the 2000s.

Today we are 19, including 16 people dedicated to the manufacture of sweaters. The workshop is made up of 19 Shima Seiki machines and 2 Stoll machines, 2 knitting machine manufacturers, the largest for many years.

Each knitting machine has different specificities. Indeed, you cannot knit everything you want with a knitting machine; they are distinguished by the size of the needle according to the thickness of the thread that they will knit. Our machine park is made up of 6 gauge 3 machines, 9 gauge 7 machines, 1 gauge 8 machine, and 2 gauge 14 machines. For example, the Vasken sweaters and cardigans are knitted in gauge 3 and the Youri sweaters are knitted in gauge 14. The machines start from 3 gauge and can go up to 28 gauge, and even more (to make very fine t-shirts). The smaller the gauge number, the wider the needle and can knit thicker yarns. The higher the gauge number, the narrower the needle and the finer the knitted yarn.

Our machine park is made up of recent machines that are between 5 and 10 years old and old machines that are almost 30 years old. The recent ones are more technical and allow you to go further in knitting. The old ones still work, they are solid and reliable, so there is no reason to part with them.

In the Nitto Knitwear team, we are 19 people, some joined us less than 6 months ago, others have been there for 38 years.

The "Big Boss", who retired last year, still comes to the workshop because he can't get away from it. He arrived in 1979, when he was 16, today he is 61. We therefore have several generations of workers in the workshop, which allows a transmission of know-how and an exchange of knowledge.

Once the sweater is knitted, especially when we make sweaters with yarns made from natural materials, we need to ennoble the yarn, make it swell, make it softer. This step also allows you to fix the wire so that it takes its final size. There will therefore be much less retraction of the sweater afterwards. This step requires different settings depending on the thread and the material used. All of our Nitto Knitwear sweaters go through this step.

To assemble a sweater, we need several sewing machines, sergers, shirgers, buttonholes, banders, and linking machines. We assemble our sweaters with almost all of these machines; it depends on the type of sweater.