Production
Drawn in Saint-Martin,
printed as close to you as we can.
« Nothing is made before you order it. »
I.
What is made here, and what is made elsewhere.
The drawings are born in Saint-Martin. In Grand-Case, in Cul-de-Sac, at anchor aboard Zéphyr — from the color of a lagoon, a fish met below the surface, a Marigot façade at the end of the day. That is where the work starts, and it is the only thing we claim as local.
Printing, on the other hand, happens elsewhere. There is no workshop on the island able to hold the quality we want across textile, ceramic and fine art paper. Bringing blank pieces in by boat, printing them here, then sending them back to Europe or North America would double both the lead time and the transport, for a poorer result.
So we did the opposite: production goes to a small number of partner workshops, chosen one by one, and we print as close as possible to the delivery address. Your order travels the fewest miles it can. The drawing still comes from the island.
II.
Three workshops, three crafts.
No single workshop does everything well. A textile printer does not fire ceramic; a fine art printer does not embroider a cap. Rather than one supplier doing everything approximately, we work with three houses, each on its own ground. Every product is tied to one workshop and one only, decided when the piece is created.
Textile workshop
In-house production units in Europe and North America. Direct-to-fiber digital printing, sublimation, transfer, and thread-by-thread embroidery for caps. This is the workshop for high-value pieces: premium tees, hoodies, embroidered caps, stickers. Our neck labels and the card tucked into the parcel come from there.
Paper & ceramic workshop
A network of printers spread across several dozen countries. Your poster or mug is produced by the workshop nearest to you, then delivered over a short distance. That is what makes it possible to ship an art print without sending it across an ocean, and to reduce the footprint of every order.
Organic cotton workshop
A French printer, on the eco-responsible line: certified organic cotton, solvent-free water-based inks, plastic-free parcels in recycled paper. This is the workshop for unisex organic cotton tees and heavy canvas totes.
III.
What we ask of them.
A partner joins the catalog if it holds these five points. None is negotiable.
Made on demand, never in advance.
No piece is printed until it has been bought. No warehouse, no stock sitting idle, no end-of-line discounted or destroyed. It is slower than same-day shipping. That is a deliberate choice.
Certified materials.
GOTS certified organic cotton and OEKO-TEX textiles on the organic cotton line. Food-safe ceramic and heavyweight art paper on the rest. Every product page states the actual material of the piece, not a generic promise.
Inks and packaging we can stand behind.
Water-based inks wherever the technique allows. Packaging plastic removed at the partners who have already done so, and explicitly asked for at the others. We would rather say it plainly: this is not yet true across 100% of the catalog.
Tracking on every parcel.
No shipment without a tracking number. If an order contains pieces handled by two different workshops, it leaves as two parcels, each with its own tracking, and you receive one email per shipment. We prefer two honest parcels to an invented delivery date.
Returns at our expense.
Misaligned print, wrong shade, piece damaged on arrival, wrong size shipped: we reship or refund, at our expense. A photo is enough. The dispute with the workshop is our business, not yours.
IV.
What it changes for you.
Allow two to five working days of production before the parcel leaves. That is the time it takes to print, dry, check and pack a piece made for you. Transit is added on top, and depends on your country.
Lead times by zone, shipping costs and what to do about a defect are set out on the Shipping & returns page.
The price shown never depends on which workshop prints the piece. Two pieces at the same price can cost us very different amounts; the gap is absorbed into our margin, not passed on to you. You are buying a My SXM piece, not a subcontracting line.
V.
What we will not tell you.
We will not tell you your tee is sewn in Grand-Case. It is not. Plenty of island brands keep that vague; we prefer the exact version, even when it reads less well.
What comes from Saint-Martin is the eye: the drawings, the places they tell, the names we give them, and the brand that carries them. The rest is manufacturing, entrusted to people whose trade it is.
What comes next is bringing part of the production back to the island — short-run screen printing, embroidery, packing. That takes a workshop, volume and time. We will say so the day it is true, not before.
— Kharim & Sophie
Aboard Zéphyr, somewhere in the Caribbean.