When a business has been in a family for years you will usually find that they know a hell of a lot about the field in which they are working. Our buttons supplier is no exception. They've been making buttons in Sheffield for decades - special buttons, buttons that have a life of their own. 

We're always keen to hear a story and benefit from the experience of the experts, we'd be stupid if we weren't to listen so when we  visited the factory recently to place an order for our forthcoming Pilsley shirts, we took a camera and documented the entire place to share with you. 

Photo's by India Hobson

I remember Tony once saying to me when we were coming down Ringinglow road after one of my first 'bonk' rides. "Enjoy that feeling, you can't buy it". I must admit that at first I had no idea what he was talking about but in hindsight I now understood what he meant.

We had been out for 6 hours riding through the Peaks District as far out as Goyt Valley. We had set off early on a sunday morning and met a few more lads at Hathersage before heading over Abney and then on to Dove Holes. A steady Sunday ride is a great thing to do in the spring or summer. A couple of cafe stops, usually for a brew and tea-cake after noon and then a longer stop for some proper scran and a full rest. On that day we had stopped at a great cafe at Flagg after going along the Goyt valley road in blissful sunshine. I was already on the back foot then but managed to hang in until we arrived.

Its great how you can recover on the bike if you've not pushed on into the red too much. It's one of the best parts of bike riding; if you go steady enough you can ride all day. It's the climbs that really take it out of you and if you want to ride in the Peaks, there's no way of avoiding them. I'd hazard a guess that we did about 9,000ft of climbing that day. 

 

As we went over the last climb of the day, Burbage, a climb I've always had a love-hate relationship with, the "wheel's had come off" so to speak. I was on my arse. Slightly dizzy and numb, faint with the feeling of low-blood sugar. That's when Tony said "Enjoy that feeling, you can't buy it".

It's a part of cycling that you can't fake, that goes beyond todays culture of just throwing money at it. It's where the real value lies, and it's completely free.

We've used Oxford cotton on four of our shirts so far; white and sky for the recent Clough shirts and white and marine stripe for the first Backtor shirts that we made back in December. The cloth has been woven for us in a Lancashire mill which we work closely with. 

Oxford cloth has a basket-weave structure. The threads are interlaced to form a criss-cross pattern which looks like a checker-board up close. There are a few types of Oxford cloth; Pinpoint and Royal Oxford are the formal variants which tend to be used to make dress shirts. Our shirts are made using plain Oxford which is more durable, better wearing and better suited to casual shirts which is why we use it. 

Linen has as good a claim as any to being the fabric of Kings. Or even Gods. Expensive to manufacture, valued for it’s exceptional coolness in hot weather, known to be worn by Egyptian royalty and believed to be worn by the angels in heaven.

Linen possesses a near perfect set of vital statistics. Beautiful, versatile, strong, durable and easy to take care of; it can be dry-cleaned, machine-washed or steamed. Also resistant to the enemies of all fabrics; stretching, staining, pilling, damage from abrasion and even moths.

One blot on this perfect landscape for some is the fact that linen creases easily. For someone who wants to remain perfectly pressed throughout the whole day this fact is a deal-breaker. For a more relaxed dude however, this characteristic is part of linen’s charm. Think of James Bond’s many excursions to hotter climes; his fabric of choice is invariably linen.

The linen we've used for the new Backtor shirts is called Denim Marl. Its aesthetic qualities are in the name; indigo colored with a fleck slub-weave detail. The perfect material for the natural Trocas shells to blossom. Warm enough for a nippy spring evening, cool enough for nice summers day. 

Whilst the finishing touches were being made to our Clough shirts, we decided to take a small break from the snowy Peaks of Derbyshire for a week in the slightly warmer climates of Mallorca. Silky smooth tarmac that snakes up mountain sides were on the menu so how could we resist? 

Normal service will resume this forthcuming week with the release of our 'Made in Sheffield' Mamnick book-marks, our second shirt release - 'Clough', plus and a re-run of the 'Backtor' shirts in a linen marl ready for spring. First we'd like to share a few visual delights from our trip. Natural splendor that's equally as inspiring as riding the bike in Derbyshire. 

It's very early days for Mamnick. There may only be three pieces in our current inventory at this moment in time but trust, we're working morning, noon and night on new items before spring arrives. We will be extending our 'Made in Sheffield' collection with a couple of new additions in February including the stainless-steel bookmark, a cycling commuter clip and a useful envelope opener.

As well as the 'Clough' shirts that we're just about to release, we are expanding our inventory with a limited run of pieces we've manufactured in Japan. Having sourced some of the finest seersucker your ever likely to feel, a perfect material for spring, along with a chambray cotton that's become know to us as 'dungaree' we're excited to share with you these samples. As before, these pieces will be available in very limited numbers in the UK.

Note, the 'Made in Japan' shirts will be identifiable by the black woven Mamnick label. 

Mamnick Black Label is due to be available mid-April.

My Grandad. When I started designing with steel I was tipping my hat to my Grandad, Eric Barnett. Mamnick is a celebration of his life as a Sheffield steel worker. 

Tony Sweeney. The man who introduced to me to the bike. He taught me how to pace myself on long rides, group riding etiquette, how to balance the pleasures of riding hard and taking in the view, why a bike with the right 1970s design beats a modern bike on form and function and a host of other aspects of cycling that might make you think he'd gone mad! But trust me - he's always on the money!

He showed me the silent 'back-wack' roads in Derbyshire - the places where you can ride for hours and only see a handful of cars. He was the person who told the me to "do one thing at a time as beautifully as possible" (which I slightly modified). And he was the person who told me a road called Mam Nick existed.

David. Our steel guy. A man who listens to me with patience when I'm excitedly rambling on in the factory about an idea I've had last night. A man who knows what can and cannot be done with steel. A man who'll spend hours getting a prototype right for me even though my cardboard model isn't to scale or doesn't even make sense. 

The women at the factories that manufacture my shirts. People like Marion who trims and sews our buttons and Emily who counts these same buttons and then dyes them exactly as I want them. Sharon who irons the final shirts, blows every spec of dust off them, folds and then packages them.

All these people make us who we are. It's about people. 

I went for a walk around Fox House on Wednesday afternoon with a friend who wanted to tell me about the Grindstone heritage of Sheffield and how this industry played it's part in the Sheffield steel industry. I have perviously been informed that there was the remains of a Gritstone quarry overlooking Burbage and that It is now seen as somewhat of a mecca for local climbers, due to the steep nature of what remains of the quarry. Can i also just say that the weather couldn't have been any worse that day. It was horrid! 

Gritstone played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution and Peak District millstones were considered to be the best quality for crushing lead-ore. This fine textured Gritstone was used to make the Grindstones which were vital to producing cutlery and other tools in Hathersage and other Sheffield areas. 

These stones were cut out of the rock in rough blocks and after doing a bit of research online i found a good quote informing me of how this was done. 

“The manner by which grinding-stones are here procured, appeared to me remarkable enough: the size is first traced on one of beds of free-stone, and all the stone about it removed; when the general form is obtained, several horizontal holes are pierced, half a foot into the stone towards its base, according to the intended thickness; dry pieces of wood are driven into these holes, and in a few days swelled by humidity, they cause the stone to split.” - J.J. Ferber, 1776. 

You can still find stone that's been pieced by the wood laying around at the base of the wall like in the image below. 

After this process the stones were then shaped and finished by skilled craftsmen at a quarry such as the one we were now stood in. Lives could depend on their skill for finishing as fractured foreheads and broken limbs, from the breaking of unsound or sometimes over-driven Grindstones were extremely common around Sheffield. Moving the stones from the quarry was a major undertaking and it's the ones that never got sold that are still lying below the Grindstones edge. 

I must thank Andy McCall for his best tour-guide impersonations and inspiring this writing. Plus a special thank you must go to the residents of Parson House Farm, for letting us take a short-cut through their land. 

Although I'm not a member of Rutland CC - Sheffield's oldest and best

cycling club - I have done a few miles with them, my favourite being

the Saturday morning 'Tea-Cake' club run. It's a decent 40 miler that

covers some of the Peak Districts best roads, including a road I've

grown to love that leads into Pilsley. I like that road so much I've

decided to name a shirt after it that will be released later in the

year.

A regular climb on the tea-cake is over Cressbrook. This is when the

'blue touch paper' is lit and anyone with the legs will mix it up -

unless they are saving themselves for a race the next day. I expect

that Brendon Tyree will have done his share of screw turning on that

ride over the years. Brendon's the lad who took these photos of the

Mam Nick hill climb from last year. He is a classy rider who raced for

GB back in his younger days and reliable rumour has it that he's had

the better of Sir Bradley Wiggins.

It made sense for us to sponsors the event as it took place at Mam

Nick. So we made a handful of exclusive Mamnick cycling cap for best

times of the day.

Here are a few photos of the hill climb by Brendon himself. 

See the full-set on Brendons website by clicking here.