Always Grateful

In 2018 a university student in Alicante was looking for a creative outlet. A friend suggested he sell the sunglasses cords everybody was wearing that summer.

That is how EME Studios starts. Conra Martinez, sunglasses cords, a trend that lasted about a season. Gabriel Morón joined as a partner the following year. The t-shirts are where it caught, and the brand grew from there into minimal, genderless, timeless clothing made mainly in Spain and Portugal, with five stores across Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

The sunglasses cords are worth dwelling on, because they are the most repeated and least discussed move in this subject.

Nude Project began as a bikini idea. Stussy began with surfboards. Nike began by importing somebody else's shoes. EME began with cords. In every case, the first product was not the destination and was extremely cheap to test, and in every case it did something more valuable than making money: it found out who was listening.

That is what a first product is actually for. Not to be right, but to locate the people who will buy the second one. Founders who wait until they have the real idea skip the step that tells them whether anybody is there.

Then the manufacturing, which is the decision that defines the brand.

Producing in Spain and Portugal costs more per unit than producing far away. That is not in dispute and there is no clever way around it. EME treats that cost as part of what it is selling rather than as a problem to engineer out of the cost sheet.

What it buys is real: short lead times, factories you can drive to, small minimums, and a story that survives being checked. That last one matters more than brands usually realise. Most supply chain claims cannot withstand a curious customer with an afternoon. This one can, because anybody can go and look.

And then there is the hardest part, which is being quiet.

A loud brand has a graphic doing the work of memory. You see the mark, you recognise it, recognition accumulates quickly. A minimalist brand has no such shortcut. Recognition has to be built by being consistent for long enough that consistency itself becomes recognisable, and that is slower, less rewarding in the early years, and much easier to abandon halfway through when a competitor with a big logo overtakes you.

The phrase the brand uses is Always Grateful. It describes a posture rather than a product, which means no garment can disprove it and it can be carried into anything they make next. Slogans about attitude outlive slogans about features for exactly that reason.

Now put EME Studios next to Nude Project, because together they settle an argument.

One is loud, painterly, and built on the founders' own faces and voices. The other is restrained to the point of being nearly anonymous. Both started at a desk in Spain within a year of each other, both with almost no money, and both worked.

So the temperature is not the variable. There is no correct volume at which to run a brand. There is only a consistent one, held long enough that people can describe you to somebody else without needing you in the room.