About

Knitwear Lab is a knitwear factory in Almere. STOLL flatbed machines, Italian merino, and about seven of us developing and producing knitwear for other brands. Thijs Verhaar by Knitwear Lab is the part that is ours.

It is where we try things first. A design starts as a fantasy, an idea and a handfeel arriving together before a single stitch is knitted, and travels through 3D visualisation, machine programming and the logic of flatbed knitting until it becomes something you can put on.

Thijs knitted his first cardigan by hand in 1975, aged twelve, in his mother's haberdashery shop. He bought his first industrial knitting machine in 1982 and opened Knitwear Lab in 2013. Lyske joined in 2017, and it has been a conversation between the two of them since.

Our programmers all have a background in design. Patterns are knitted in shape, so nothing is cut away. Knitting, linking, steaming, ironing and packing all happen here, by the people who work here. And we are rarely only seven: there are usually about as many interns in the building as permanent staff. The brand is where they get their hands on the whole process, from a pattern on screen to a finished scarf in a box.

Most weekends from late summer into December, we load the car and drive the collection across Germany ourselves, from Aachen to Berlin to Stuttgart. It is still the fastest way to find out whether something works. You watch someone pick it up.