“Sea island cotton” is one of the best cotton in the world only produced in very limited area of the Caribbean Sea.　 In Japan, only members of West Indian Sea Island Cotton Association are allowed to deal with the cotton. Glen Clyde became a member of the association in May 2012, which enabled us to realize our long cherished dream, that is, producing “made in Japan” casual socks made of “sea island cotton”.

Since this had never been tried in Japan there were no data of know-how on the thickness of yarns, dyeing, twisted yarns, knitting machines, under threads, density and so on. After much trial and error, we finally succeeded in creating the first casual socks ever making the best of the features of “sea island cotton”.

“Hand linking” is a sewing way of looping every corresponding stitch one by one by craftsman’s hands. The technique for business socks is still alive today but hand linking for coarse gauge has disappeared as the price of casual socks got cheaper. At the launch of “sea island cotton”, we had strong wish to offer high-quality casual socks to our customers and brought back the extinct technique of hand linking for coarse gauge. And now we can sew socks toes by hand linking for coarse, middle and fine gauge.

Thus there were so many efforts to bring back the hand linking and we would like many people to enjoy this high-quality technique. We use this not only for “sea island cotton COLLECTION” but also for other original brands such as “CHUP”, “& LIFE SOX” and “Flidis” which will gradually shift to hand linking toe sewing as much as possible for better quality. Because we found only one linking machine for coarse gauge and the product efficiency is very low we are afraid that it is difficult to shift all our products to linking immediately.