Why Our Stuff is Expensive: The Craft Behind Sleepy Peach

Let me just start with this: we know. We know our cardigans cost more than a dinner date, and our sweaters aren’t competing with a $20 sweater from Walmart. But we’re not trying to. At Sleepy Peach, we’re not in the business of racing to the bottom. We’re in the business of making clothes that feel like a punchline to a cosmic joke. That joke being: what if clothes were actually made well?

I’m Eric. I co-run Sleepy Peach with my wife, Juliet.  We do everything ourselves: design, fund, pack, model, ship. So if something feels oddly personal in our packaging or descriptions, that’s because it is.

Anyway, let’s talk about money.

The Cost Cardigan Conundrum

Here’s the thing: $98 sounds expensive until you know what’s behind it. First, the obvious part: we don’t use cheap fabric. All of our sweaters and cardigans are made with 100% cotton. Not a poly blend. Not “mostly cotton.” Full, breathable, wears-better-over-time cotton. If that’s not sexy to you, it will be when your sweater doesn’t pill like a frightened hamster in the wash.

Then there’s the factory. The stuff we don't make in our warehouse is made professionally by BSCI-compliant manufacturers. That means no sweatshops. No kids sewing at 3am. It means real wages, ethical treatment, and a supply chain that doesn’t make us feel like we need to shower after reading about it.

You want to know what’s cheaper? Unethically made polyester, produced at mass scale, with a design ripped from some smaller artist on Instagram (sometimes us!). You can find that for $19.99. But we’re not competing with that. We’re building something else.

It’s Not Just the Materials

It’s not just the cotton. It’s the design process.

Every pattern we make starts as a strange idea. “What if a cardigan was made out of teeth?” “Can a rat pattern look gentle?” “Is this too many flowers?” Then it becomes a sketch. Then it becomes something we debate, tweak, move around pixel by pixel.

Then comes color selection. If you’ve ever wondered why our sweaters don’t look like anything else, it’s because we spend hours—and I mean hours—refining every single shade. Not just "red," but the right red. The red that makes you nostalgic for a childhood birthday party even if you never had one.

Then we turn that into a knit pattern. Not print. Knit. That means the design is part of the garment itself. The thread is the art. That’s why our sweaters feel like they belong in a museum gift shop run by a cartoon character.

Made in Small Batches

We don’t make 5,000 of anything. We don’t even make 500. When we make a cardigan, it’s usually in runs of 100–200 pieces. That’s it.

That means we can’t lean on mass-production discounts. We can’t spread costs across a warehouse-sized backlog of inventory. But it also means your cardigan is rare. Like, "Oh hey, I saw someone wearing that in Portland once and I yelled across the street" rare. It has happened to us, and it will happen to you.

We Wear Every Piece Ourselves

We don’t design for trends. We design for us. If Juliet doesn’t like how it drapes or if I don’t like how it looks with jeans and coffee stains, it’s back to the drawing board. There’s no focus group. There’s no AI moodboard. There’s just us asking, “Would I wear this to an art museum and then immediately to a diner?”

That’s our bar.

Every piece gets test-worn, washed, reworn, and adjusted. So when something drops, it’s not just a cute pattern. It’s a piece of clothing we believe in. One that we wear until it falls apart from actual use (not bad quality).

We Pay Ourselves.

The truth? That $98 cardigan costs us around $40 to make. Add $8.70 to ship it to you. That leaves us with $50 before taxes, platform fees, payment processor cuts, and everything else. We put some of that into ads, so new people find us. Some of it goes into saving up for our next design run. And some of it? It pays for groceries.

We don’t have investors. We don’t take pre-orders. We don’t drop-ship. Every sale funds the next product. That’s why when you buy something, it actually matters. Not in a fake “support small biz” kind of way, but in a real, material, “we can afford to do another weird frog cardigan” kind of way.

It’s Not Just Clothes

We’re trying to build a world. Sleepy Peach isn’t just a place to buy a shirt. It’s a little soft corner of the internet where you can feel seen. Where bugs are beautiful. Where maximalism is a love language. Where your clothes say, “Yes I am weird, and yes I am thriving.”

Our customers tell us it makes them feel braver. More like themselves. That’s the kind of expensive we can stand behind. Not because we want to be inaccessible, but because making something this weird and this good takes time, takes craft, and costs real money.

We’re not interested in selling cheap. We’re interested in selling something you love. Something you reach for when your laundry pile is huge and you still want to feel good. Something that makes someone stop you on the sidewalk. Something that feels like you.

TL;DR: Why It’s Expensive

• 100% cotton knitwear, not cheap prints or poly blends

• Original art, not AI or stolen Pinterest boards

• Ethically made in small batches

• Designed, modeled, packed, and shipped by two real people

• We actually wear-test and adjust every item

• Your purchase funds the next thing we make

If that’s not your thing, we get it. But if it is? Welcome to the cult.

We’ll save you a cardigan.