Handmade by Gossamer Rozen
Artist Gossamer Rozen explains how the Tigerbob brand will focus on handmade pieces created in-house at Tigerbob Store in Brooklyn, New York.
My first collection of cut-and-sew garments, put together from vintage textiles, sold out in 2020 during the Covid lockdown. At the time the Tigerbob brand was founded (May 2022), I had little prior experience patterning garments from scratch.
But it was always my goal to produce knitted garments by hand. I fell in love with the domestic knitting machine as early as 2010, when I discovered the machine on eBay searches & textile blogs. It was not until February 2022 that I could buy my first machine, after taking a four-week weekend introductory course at the Textile Arts Center.
Fast forward three years and now we are here. It’s March 2025 and I’m very close to launching my first handmade collection for the Tigerbob brand. But what did it take to get here, and what is the meaning of all the handmade pieces I’ve made up until now?
Artists need to explore & iterate, no matter the level of constraints placed upon them, in order to move the work forward. For many artists, like myself, the primary constraint is money and time (which is also money). Learning a new skill is expensive, far beyond the required materials.
I used my knitting machine at my home, buying cashmere yarn in small 110g cones in as many colors as I could afford. Once I could lock down the skills required, the primary focus was to interpret my current visual language in this new medium.
Simultaneously, I was learning how to produce my own tech packs with the Tailored Industry team in Brooklyn, New York. Sourcing yarn in bulk, creating specifications for the shape of the garment, grading for multiple sizes, and programming swatches to produce the exact specifications for the knit fabric itself — these were all brand new tasks with a high learning curve and a high financial impact.
But this process allowed me to design & iterate as many new designs as possible with Tailored. My machine knitting skills still needed time to develop. In 2022, was barely able to finish a single garment in four weeks. But by mid-2024, I was completing a new garment in three or four days. The first three years of Tigerbob were truly held together by my manufacturing partner, who could iterate on multiple designs & silhouettes so I could receive vital feedback about the finished work — from customer responses to my own personal styling.
It’s also important for me to note the difficulty in pricing these early handmade pieces. I was able to sell a few in late 2023 and early 2024, but I had a harder time parting with these time-consuming & heavily experimental pieces in expensive materials I could not easily obtain. I needed to increase my speed at production even if that meant making a lot of things I could not sell at the price they were worth at the time.
A lot of experimentation & risk was required to develop this skill in a relatively short time frame, considering the financial limitations requiring me to recoup the cost of my time & materials & also find a way to pave the way to being profitable as a small business.
With all that behind me, I was ready to start curating what I produced. I put together a selection of five looks styled from handmade pieces (and some manufactured ones) I created in the last two years, in December 2024. This selection helped me understand my voice with wearable art and dictate the following collections in 2025.
Floppy-eared square hats, two-color checkers & multicolor stripes; oversized, baggy silhouettes with extra long sleeves and blocky, soft shapes. Lounge & sleepwear reimagined as comfortable outerwear with thick, plush fabric and a firm drape.
I don’t think any specific garment I am creating is new. Oversized, blocky, and square has been around forever — even thousands of years if you count ancient garments produced all over the world. While my unique visual language — my graphic artwork — is an obvious strength, I’m not simply slapping my drawings on these garments.
No, I want these graphics to be integrated into the construction of the garment — not just literally, in the required techniques to produce the fabric, but also harmoniously with my selection of color palettes, scale of stripes & pattern work, and other hallmarks such as hand-sewn tags, the choice of yarn thickness & material content, and more.
I spent the last three years making garments so I could understand what precisely is Tigerbob. What feels Tigerbob-ish? What feels the most Tigerbob? Not just in how it looks, but how I feel when I’m wearing it. When I pair a Tigerbob garment with something else in my closet, how does it integrate? How does it stand out? How does a Tigerbob garment share the story of someone wearing it?
Tigerbob has been many things for myself and for those who collect it — whether that person enjoys digital art, plushies, tattoos, art prints, or garments. And in a naturally meandering way, I continue to discover & learn how to tell my story in these mediums regardless of the hurdles in my way.
While this particular retrospect of handmade pieces is no longer for sale, please expect the first drop of handmade Tigerbob garments to go live this month — a smaller drop of accessories this weekend and a larger drop of one-of-a-kind garments at the top of April 2025.
Walking video clips (with music!) of this collection are available for view on our Instagram.
Be sure to sign up for our mailing list to learn about the upcoming drop schedule.
