Black is not one colour

Hold two black garments next to each other in daylight and one of them will almost always look wrong — greener, browner, or washed out. Black is the hardest colour to hold consistently, and the reason is that it is not really a colour so much as an absence you have to manufacture.

Piece dyeing — colouring the fabric before it is cut — gives you the most consistency across a run, but the dye sits on the surface and fades from the seams first. Garment dyeing, where the finished piece goes into the bath, gives a depth you cannot fake and a fade that goes soft rather than patchy.

We garment-dye the tees and piece-dye the heavier knits. It is not a purist position; it is what each fabric responds to. Heavy loopback in a garment dye comes out uneven at the cuffs, and no amount of process control fixes it.

The practical upshot for you: our black tee will drift, slowly, toward a deep charcoal over a couple of years. That is the material behaving correctly, not a defect. The hoodies will not.