Two kinds of people at a client brand use the Index: designers, who are looking for a wash, and buyers, who need to know what a wash means for cost and timing.
Access is granted to an organisation. Within that organisation, each person has a seat. A seat records who they are, which segment they work on — denim capsules, everyday, men, or women — and whether they are a designer or a buyer.
The number of seats varies by client. A small brand may have one designer and one buyer covering all denim. A large one may have a designer for each segment, with a buyer alongside each. The Index does not assume either.
Uses the Vintage Library early in a season to find references, then the House Library and their own archive once the range is set. What they need from a record is whether the wash can be reproduced, and on which fabric.
Uses the same records for planning. They need to know whether the fabric is held in stock, the minimum order per colour, how long bulk takes after approval, and what duty applies based on where the fabric is made. Fabrics Nº 118 and Nº 132 are held in stock, with minimums of 800 m and 600 m per colour and bulk delivery in 30 days. This information is on the record itself, not on a separate page.
Four problems a denim team has every season, and how the Index addresses each one.
Washes are usually briefed with adjectives, tear sheets and a courier bag of samples. The wash lab interprets the brief and makes a sample from that interpretation. When the interpretation is wrong it costs another sampling round, which takes about three weeks.
In the Index a request starts from a wash that already exists. The designer names the filed wash, the fabric it should run on, and what should change about it, one facet at a time. The wash lab receives a known starting point and a short list of differences, rather than an interpretation to make. Each record also carries an identification code, IN-GN·M·F1·R·U for Nº 214, which is how it is filed and found again.
A mood board shows what a designer likes. It does not show whether the mill can produce it, on which fabric, or at what lead time.
The Vintage Library holds garments that have already been analysed. Record VR-018 includes its own analysis — the fade is concentrated at the knee and thigh, the cast has gone green-grey along the seams, the hand is still dry after decades — and lists the two house washes that come closest to it: Nº 214 and Nº 219. The designer can see what is achievable before asking for it.
Environmental disclosure is moving to per-product data. AGEC in France, and the PEF method the EU's product rules are based on, both require figures per garment rather than per factory.
Each house record already carries those figures. Nº 214 uses 31 L of water per garment and is ZDHC MRSL conformant; Nº 203 uses 44 L, the highest on the shelf. Each fabric record states its country of origin, which determines duty: fabric made in Pakistan enters the EU duty-free under GSP+. Fabrics held in stock — Nº 118, Nº 125 and Nº 132 — are marked as such, with bulk delivery in 30 days.
Design teams turn over. Two seasons after a development, the person who ran it has often left and the recipe is in an email thread nobody can find, so the wash is developed again from the beginning.
Every development commissioned through the Index is saved as a DR record against the seat that requested it, with its code, fabric, recipe, water figure and the notes from each round. This happens as part of the process rather than as a separate filing step.
Access is granted to an organisation. Each person in it has a seat, and each seat has a role: designer, buyer, or mill.
Designers and buyers only ever see their own organisation. Hearts, boards and requests belong to the seat that created them and are visible to every other seat in the same organisation. No partner can see another partner's boards, requests or archive.
MK Sons holds a third role, mill, which can see all partner organisations at once: their boards, their requests grouped by status, and their archives by segment. This is the requirement as the owner stated it: we should be able to see them combined at our end.
It is one role and one access policy, not a separate product. The MK Sons view is described in §06.
The Index requires a sign-in. There is no public version, no preview and no partially hidden records. Access begins with the first signed development agreement, at any order volume. The grammar itself is public and documented in the design guidelines; the libraries are not.
A signed partner sees a shelf record in full: the fabric, the water figure, and the recipe that produced it — Desize 10′ · Stone 45′ · Enzyme 40′ · Soft 4′.
A development commissioned by a partner stays within their organisation permanently. It appears on the House shelf only if that partner agrees in writing, and only after checking that no competitor of theirs would see it. DR-058 is currently the only client wash on the shelf, and its record states this: Client production · Written consent · Competitor-screened.
A request is always attached to the seat that made it. That is how it reaches the right archive and how the wash lab knows who is asking. A request cannot be made without a seat.
Each of these rules is a table and an access policy in schema.sql. organisations and seats define the boundary, records carry a visibility flag for the consent case, and row-level security restricts each partner to their own organisation while letting the mill role read everything.
There are three ways records are kept. They differ in how much effort they take and in who else can see them.
A heart marks a record as a favourite. It takes one click and is private to the seat that made it: nobody else in the organisation sees it, and neither does MK Sons. It is for records a designer is considering before a season has taken shape.
A board is a named collection, for example AW27 — Washed Blacks. A seat can have as many boards as it needs. A board can hold anything in the register: house washes, vintage studies, fabrics from the shelf, and the seat's own DR records.
Each item on a board can carry a note explaining why it is there, because the reason is usually more specific than the item — one record for its colour, another only for its hand. A board is what a designer briefs from.
The archive holds every development a partner has commissioned, as DR records. Nothing is added to it by hand. A record is created when a request is approved, and it includes the notes from each round — for example, First round approved; whisker lowered per fit comment.
These four items and their notes are a brief: Nº 122's colour, on fabric Nº 132, with VR-014's hand. The board can be sent as exactly that.
A request is the only thing in the Index that goes to the mill. Three things can start one, and all three lead to the same five steps.
Two options. Request as is runs the recorded recipe on the recorded fabric. Request with changes opens the change panel described in step two.
Send as a development brief takes the board's items as references, uses one of them as the base, and carries the notes across — Nº 122's colour, on fabric Nº 132, with VR-014's hand.
Develop toward this sets the study as the target. The house washes that already come closest are offered as starting points: VR-018 opens with Nº 214 and Nº 219.
Every request starts from one existing record. The base carries its code, fabric and recipe into the request unchanged. Everything after this is expressed as a difference from it.
Changes are recorded one facet at a time against the base record: which way the cast should lean, one step up or down the wash ladder, and a finish from F0 to F3. That list of differences is the request. The identification code follows along beside it, so the record the sample will be filed under is visible before anything is sampled.
The dashed value in each row is the base record's.
The comments field is read by the wash lab. Nothing in the system parses it. It is for anything the facets above have no place for, and the structured changes exist so that it does not have to carry the whole brief.
A wash depends on the fabric it is run on. A request uses either a fabric from the Materials shelf or the partner's own. Lead time is different in each case, so it is recalculated rather than stated once.
Fit works the same way as fabric: a shelf of MK Sons blocks now, with partner-supplied blocks planned. The wash lab needs a block because a whisker set for a high-rise straight leg is a different file from one set for a wide leg.
The request is given a number when it is sent. The DR number is separate: it is issued from a sequence when the wash lab accepts the request, which keeps DR numbers in order.
No part of this flow shows a price. Where a catalogue would show one, the record shows its water figure — 31 L per garment for Nº 214, 44 L for Nº 203. Commercial terms are agreed with MK Sons directly.
The panel above works, but this is a document. Nothing is sent.
A request has a status and a log. Each change of status is recorded as an event, and the last one creates the archive record.
A revision is not a new request. It reopens the change panel against the sample that arrived, rather than against the original record, and adds a round to the same log.
MK Sons uses the same Index through the mill role, which shows all partner organisations together and gives the wash lab one queue.
All seats of one partner in a single view: their boards as they stand, their requests grouped by status, and their archive by segment. Each item shows which seat created it, so it is clear which segments are active and which have gone quiet since last season.
The request queue as one list, ordered by status rather than by client: filed, accepted, at the wash lab, shipped, awaiting feedback. This is the combined view described in §03, and it is the only thing the mill role adds.
Not a mood board. A request arrives as the base record it starts from, the fabric it runs on, the fit block, the changes facet by facet, the comments as written, any attached images, and the code the result will be filed under.
Request 0148 · House Meridian · Woman
Base Nº 214 · the filed wash to start from
Fabric Nº 132 · 12 oz stretch · held in stock
Fit Fit Nº 12 · Woman · high-rise straight
Changes Wash M → L, one step lighter · Finish F1 → F0 · Cast held at GN
Comments Lower the whisker; hold the green cast past the third home wash…
Filed as IN-GN·L·F0·H·W
When a request is accepted, a DR number is issued and held against it. The wash lab works to that number — recipe, water figure, notes from each round — and the record is created in the partner's archive when the sample is approved.
Four measures. Each one is about the partner's outcome rather than our activity.
This document, and schema.sql beside it: the data model written as DDL, so the prototype has a defined contract before it has a database.
The prototype will run on Supabase. Auth handles the sign-in, row-level security enforces the per-organisation rules described in §03, and Storage holds the photography and the references attached to a request. Nothing at this stage needs a live account.
Partner-supplied fit blocks. A notification feed for request status, so the timeline is pushed rather than checked. Side-by-side comparison of any two records.
Fade Deck cross-referencing. The Deck is a bound set of washed swatches covering the grid, calibrated against the Index and given to client design teams, so a code can be read against fabric rather than a screen. Each swatch carries its code, and the Index finds the record from it.
Seat management in the interface. Organisations and seats are created manually until there are enough of them to justify a screen.
Wash generation is not part of any stage above and will not appear in this document, or in any deck, until it works.