Seamless knitwear is knitted as a complete, three-dimensional garment in a single process, with no cut panels and no sewing. The result is a garment with no seams to rub, no waste yarn on the cutting room floor, and a fit that moves with the body rather than against it. NZ Charly uses Shima Seiki WholeGarment technology, the industry-leading seamless knitting system, to make every piece in its collection.
What Is Seamless Knitwear?
Most knitwear is made the same way garments have been made for centuries. Flat panels are knitted, cut to shape, and sewn together. It is fast, familiar, and produces off-cuts. Those off-cuts are waste. In a high-volume factory, they can account for up to 30% of the yarn used.
Seamless knitwear, also called WholeGarment knitwear, is different. The entire garment, sleeves, body, neckline, cuffs, is knitted in a single continuous process on a machine that works in three dimensions. When it comes off the machine, it is finished. No cutting. No sewing. No waste.
Why it produces a better garment
Seams are compression points. In a conventional jumper, the shoulder seam sits across one of the most mobile joints in the body. The sleeve seam runs along the arm. These seams restrict movement, create pressure points, and are the most common failure points in a garment's lifespan.
Remove the seams and you remove those failure points. A seamless garment flexes where the body flexes. It drapes differently. It lasts longer.
A WholeGarment piece is structurally closer to a knitted tube than a sewn garment. The body and the garment move together.
Seamless vs conventional knitwear
The Shima Seiki WholeGarment machine
Shima Seiki is a Japanese company that developed WholeGarment technology in the 1990s. Their flatbed knitting machines use four needle beds to knit in the round, allowing three-dimensional shaping that conventional two-bed machines cannot achieve. The machines NZ Charly uses are manufactured by Shima Seiki and operated by the Auckland manufacturer that produces every NZ Charly piece.
WholeGarment is a registered trademark of Shima Seiki. It is not a general marketing term. If a brand uses it, they are using Shima Seiki technology. That matters, because there is a meaningful difference between genuinely seamless knitting and reduced-seam construction, which is a different, less exacting process.
What this means for the environment
A conventional knitwear production run generates significant textile waste. WholeGarment production generates almost none at the garment construction stage. Combined with NZ Charly's use of natural fibres and its small-batch, made-to-order approach, the garment that reaches you has a substantially smaller production footprint than most comparable products.
Every NZ Charly piece is knitted whole in Auckland, from natural fibres with a traceable supply chain.
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