Through It All, Decade Studio Finds a Way

Molly Spittal learned from her first fashion business.

In the early 2010s, she opened a handbag company in Montreal that scaled quickly, but she was handling every part of the business herself: design, production, sales—everything. She personally made every bag by hand.

Her now-husband, Matthew Atkinstall, joined the business three years later as the endeavour grew. She enjoyed some success but ultimately closed shop in 2019 when it became clear the handbag market was saturated. True to her natural sense of optimism, she walked away with her head held high and clear hindsight. “We didn’t know how to manage growth. It was a hard lesson,” she says.

The pair moved to Vancouver (where she had gone to design school a decade prior), took those lessons, and started a search for a family-run factory that could produce the type of long-lasting, durable, and high-style goods she wanted. While she piloted a range of goods under the name Decade Studio, the big hit was the jeans.

All of this ramp-up ran right into the pandemic in early 2020. Spittal says she was incredibly lucky that Decade made it through that time, and she attributes it to a flexibility that has kept going since then. “The support [for Decade] during COVID was out of this world,” the Calgary native says. “We pivot so frequently, and it just has to be swift.”

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When talking with Spittal, it’s clear she’s in the trenches yet fully in tune with the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship. She knows how to pivot well, and often, and in an unpredictable era of tariffs, a new daily geopolitical crisis, and economic roller-coasters, she’s sticking to her game plan.

 

Decade Studio is purposely small. Spittal and Atkinstall are the only two employees, supported by just a couple of investors. The brand puts out just a handful of jeans twice a year. What Spittal focuses on is a wide range of sizing and fits within those lines. Beyond an obsessive eye for detail and quality, there’s a flattering fit for almost any body type and size.

Size inclusivity remains a huge problem in fashion, where standard sizing charts and formats are limited to just a few body types. Spittal found a gap in bringing pleasure to the denim-buying process. To be clear, these are not inexpensive jeans, but they are competitive with other high-end denim brands. Few, if any, of those brands offer the range of sizing Decade does: from 26 to 40. “I don’t have the lived experience of buying plus-size jeans, but my research told me that every customer I’ve met wants nonstretch jeans that fit a long time,” she says.

Spittal found a small factory in Portugal that could meet her requirements, and it’s the same family-run operation she uses today. She’s very clear that there are no restocks or second runs of sizing. There are two seasonal releases per year, and that’s it. After all, this isn’t fast fashion: it is slow, methodical fashion meant to break in over time and wear for years.

Beyond Decade’s storefront/HQ in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a small group of independent retailers in Canada and the United States carry the jeans. Spittal says she spent a long time building relationships with these stores ,and it’s part of her plan to help Decade grow at a sustainable clip. “The experience of coming to our store and buying jeans that fit across the entire size spectrum can be an incredibly fulfilling experience,” she says.

Spittal has a general plan for Decade’s growth, and that includes increasing the size range up to 46 or 48. While she’d like to open additional doors and maybe do a North American pop-up tour, she admits she’s “not mentally ready for that right now.”

That’s all fine, because Decade is in no rush. The brand has been through the ups and downs, and seems prepared to weather whatever’s next in the pursuit of a great-fitting pair of jeans.

Photographs by Matt Atkinstall. Courtesy of Decade Studio.

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