Hahaha, I admit I posted in part to get the “HN is better than Google at finding things, as long as you claim it can’t be done” effect :-)

Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!

Crowd-funded, not available for direct order/purchase.

I generally assume crowd funded to mean "created by a quasi-outsider with not much industry knowledge who will make simple mistakes that drastically reduce the quality of the product"

This isn't a group looking to make a potentially one-off product in an attempt to break into the industry. This is a different marketing and manufacturing model that is trying to mini-max the cost-to-quality ratio by only making products that have already sold. Similar production quality as other selvedge denim companies like APC or Iron Heart, and sewn in the US. The fabric they source is often of limited supply, either discontinued or small production runs, from high quality mills.

Generally not the worst assumption, but these guys have been around for a decade plus

I doubt the sears catalog shirt was made by the thousands sitting on warehouse shelves.

The Five Brothers Shirt which I was gifted when I was down on my luck and just out of the service was made in a quantity which allowed a friend's aunt to purchase 4 of them as gifts for all the younger folks at her Christmas party that year, and there were quite a few on the sales floor at Sears when my folks took me school clothes shopping each year.

They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread.

Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.

OP mention shirts from the 30s-50s. I’m sure the operation warehoused more as the market changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the garments 100 years ago were basically made to order for a mail order taking a week or more to deliver. I’d expect by the 80s this had entirely changed.