Behind the brand

Meet our shirt supplier

While we do not own the production facilities where our garments are made, we carry the responsibility in close collaboration with our suppliers to ensure that all our products are manufactured in a fair, safe and ethical way.

Good relations are important to us, and we believe that trust and product innovation are developed over years of collaborating. We therefore have long-time and close relations with many of our suppliers and visit them regularly to discuss possibilities for optimizing a responsible business regarding new production methods, packaging, or the use of organic cotton in our products. 

Machado Pinto is our trusted shirt supplier with whom we have worked since the very beginning of Blue de Gênes. In this supplier portrait we would like you to meet Miguel Pinto da Rocha, CEO of the family-owned company in Guimarães, Portugal and a close friend to our founder Ole Madsen.

Miguel, Machado Pinto has been in business since 1974, can you tell us about how it all started?

“My father Joao da Rocha and my mother Maria Júlia da Conceição Machado Pinto started the factory in 1974 just before the Carnation Revolution and ran the business up till 1992 where he decided to stop manufacturing. Globalization hadn’t started and many countries were protective towards their own production which led to export quotas from Portugal which made it really hard to do business. Quotas were divided equally upon the number of producers, which made it impossible to plan production and do business when you received orders that were higher than what you were allowed to export.“

When did you start up again?

"After a few years and pressure from industry some of the regulations were withdrawn and my brother Carlos Alberto Pinto da Rocha and I decided to restart mass production, however the company was never closed. We began on the 2nd of January in 1995 together with five employees – in fact these five employees are still with us this day, almost 30 years later. We are family owned by my brother and I and we consider ourselves and our employees as one big family."

How did you start up again?

"We started with the basics and from an early stage we knew that we wanted to be experts – we wanted to make the best product possible. Step by step we improved production, the workmanship, the touch, something that cannot be learned in any school. Globalization had already started, and some companies had started moving production to China where the labour costs are much lower. We knew we had to specialize in knowledge, craftsmanship and service if we wanted to survive."

What is the hardest part of running a production?

"The hardest part is planning production and keeping a steady production flow. We are not like a bakery that bakes 100 pieces of bread every day. Many of our clients need to have their items produced within the same window so the main task for us is to balance requests with different complexity and delivery dates so that we can spread production throughout the whole year."

...At the moment we are at full capacity and do not have aspirations of growing any further. We want to be a boat in a steady ocean though it’s hard in a business where fashion changes every 8 seconds. We are a team of 60 people inside doors and there are some subcontractors that we trust and that help us in hard times when we have more orders than we can handle. Anyway, they cannot replace us. We work with them only on easy styles such as a classic men shirt...

...We are not interested in producing more, all we care about is providing the best service to our customers and building long-lasting trusting and friendly relationships with them.

Machado Pinto
Tailoring since 1974
machadopinto.com