Scrubs and workwear built for the whole shift

Kecols started in 2018 with one shirt. A friend ran a heating and cooling crew here in Fort Worth, and his people kept wearing through the left shoulder, where the strap of the tool bag sat all day. We cut a heavier tee, doubled the stitching across the shoulder seam, and handed out twelve of them.

Nine months later we asked for those twelve back. The shoulders had held. The hems had not, so we moved to a wider hem and stitched it twice. That is still how the cutting table works: we wear a cut ourselves, wash it fifty times, and look at what gave way first.

The scrub line came from a question. A nurse in an emergency department asked for the same shirt, but in a color her ward allowed and with somewhere to put a badge. Scrubs turned out to be a harder problem than work shirts, because a scrub top has to look tidy at hour eleven and it has to do that after two hundred washes.

Today the Kecols range holds 220 pieces in 29 lines. Our scrub line takes up 121 of them, from tops and pants to jackets and a maternity block. The work line takes the other 99: pocket tees, henleys, utility shirts, work pants and bib overalls, plus a small set of chef coats and kitchen pants.

Colors matter more here than in most closets. A ward picks ceil blue and sticks to it. A shop wants everyone in navy so a stranger on the floor stands out. So we keep each cut in as many colors as the line can carry, and we name the color the way the mill names it, not the way a catalog wishes it sounded.

Sizing is where uniforms go wrong, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Knit tops run close to standard. Woven shirts run one step roomier through the chest. Work pants come in waist and inseam, and our Tall inseams add two inches, which is short of what some people need. Measure a garment you already like, then compare it with the chart.

There are things this catalog does not do. We do not make flame resistant clothing, and nothing here belongs in a welding bay or near an arc flash. We do not call any fabric antimicrobial or fluid resistant, because those words carry test standards behind them and nothing here has been tested against them. Our scrub fabric sheds a splash of water. That is the whole claim.

What we do stand behind is plain. Seams that survive a laundry that runs hot. Pockets set where a hand goes without looking. Colors that stay recognizable after a year, so a replacement piece matches the one it replaces. A uniform gets judged at the end of a twelve hour shift, and that is the only review that counts.