The Fashion Finishers
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The fashion finishers
When buying a New Zealand-made garment, it’s likely that the experts at Nickel & Young have provided the finishing touches.
Words: Carolyn Enting
Fashion designers love them, while most consumers are oblivious, yet that doesn’t stop garment finishers and business and life partners Glenn Yungnickel and Alberto de Souza of Nickel & Young from taking pride in their work.
Their client list is impressive and includes WORLD, Juliette Hogan, Wynn Hamlyn, Jane Daniels, Repertoire, Penny Sage, Moochi, Olivia Cashmore, Karen Walker, Zambesi and Porter James Sports. Not to forget, Gemmells premium shoe and bag repair, which buys many of our leather hardware pieces for shoe, bag and leather repairs.
At the time of my visit a collection of special-order WORLD garments is awaiting final touches, whilst the delivery of another New Zealand made label Juliette Hogan is added to the pile.
Nickel & Young also hem pants for Uptown local Porter James Sports as well as help finish some of the brand’s NZ-produced pieces.
Many New Zealand labels also need finishing work on one-off samples before being sent offshore for bulk production. And sometimes work comes back the other way when repair work is required for offshore-manufactured garments to fix faulty domes before they hit the stores.
“Because the New Zealand garment industry is so small, a lot of the factories don’t have the specialized machinery, and that’s where we fit in,” explains Glenn. “If a jacket needs keyhole buttonholes and buttons attached, they’ll send it here and we’ll do the finishing touches.”
Nickel & Young are a bright light in a limited local manufacturing landscape and an underground poster child for Uptown, which has the hallmarks of becoming Auckland City’s garment district. Here jeans are domed and riveted, designer samples finished, buttons and belts covered in chosen fabrics, trousers hemmed, and keyholes cut for buttons. The work is meticulous as well as mindful and requires skill and concentration.
“It’s nice to be able to focus on one thing,” says Alberto. “Working with garment finishing is kind of therapeutic. It’s just you and the machine, so you must be focused.”
They’re also a beacon for fashion school students and serious home sewers seeking high-quality finishes for their garments.
Yes, Nickel & Young is open to the public, so if you’ve picked up a good score at a local op shop, like a jacket that needs new buttons, or want to customize buttons or a belt in a particular fabric, this is your one-stop shop. Though it can be overwhelming, don’t worry; that’s Glenn and Alberto’s specialty.
Here you can peruse and shop the thousands of options of clasps, closures, eyelets, buckles, buttons, studs, hooks, rings, slides, and other hardware, as well as leather tools and belt-making kits, and tri-glides for hiking bags and horse bridles. Also available on their website.
Shelving in the center of the workshop presents as a riot of colour with reel upon reel of cotton thread in practically every shade – because finishing garments for different brands is very colour specific.
Other detailed focused work includes attaching eyelets to corsets for wedding garments. “You cannot make a single mistake because it will be noticed and you have to wash your hands constantly because the fabric is white,” says Alberto.
Glenn agrees it must be very precise – “millimetres count, not centimetres. I’m very quality focused. It has to be perfect.”
For this reason, there are some jobs that only Glenn – who has an honours and master’s degree in fashion design – will do.
The pair met through friends in 2015. Alberto, hails from Nanuque-MG, Brazil, and was doing a double major in management and business information systems at AUT. Glenn was a fashion tutor at AUT. He also worked at Fabric Merchants and had his own menswear label, Yungnickel, as a side hustle.
With travel and adventure in their sights they moved to London in 2017, and it was here they learned they could work together after both landing a job in dispatch at Harrods. Next stop was Brazil in 2019, where they had plans to start their own a menswear label, but Covid saw them return to New Zealand in 2020.
Opportunity knocked in a different guise when Glenn learned that garment finishing business Apparel Attachments (formerly Nancy’s Button Services) based in Mt Roskill was up for sale. Alberto also came on board, learning everything from scratch.
They spent one year at Mt Roskill before moving into their current premises (Unit 7/74 Upper Queen St) and along the way acquired fastenings and hardware supplier GDL Trading Ltd, merging the businesses and becoming Nickel & Young.
Glenn and Alberto live as well as work in the building with their dog, Tui, The Pom (Pomeranian), and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Uptown Eden Terrace was one of the first places Alberto lived when he came to New Zealand as a student and a place he calls home, plus it’s closer to their clientele.
Alberto also has a green thumb in the same way that fashion is a passion for Glenn and has his own little secret garden in a light well in the middle of the building where he happily potters.
Meanwhile Glenn is happiest when he is making and is planning to resurrect his Yungnickel label side hustle – unisex streetwear that incorporates tailored elements. So, watch this space.
nickelandyoung.co.nz