Origin
Aklasu was founded in 2013 in Alberta, Canada by Mensah and Chantelle. The brand began with an observation about how men buy ties.
Most ties are bought one at a time, in moments of need: a wedding, a first job, a funeral. The drawer fills, the closet bulges, and the wardrobe still feels short of the right thing for the moment that matters. Aklasu was built around the opposite premise. Fewer ties, chosen carefully, made well, and kept long.
The Case for Como
The choice to make ties in Como was not a category-wide rule. It was a specific decision about ties.
Como has woven silk for five centuries, and the techniques required to produce a tie that knots cleanly, drapes properly, and lasts thirty years are practised there at a level matched almost nowhere else. Geography is never the value. The value is what the geography proves.
The Partners
The mills and families Aklasu works with have practised their craft for generations. A century-old loom is not a marketing detail. It is the guarantee that the people running it know exactly what comes off it, and have known for longer than any of us.
These are working relationships, not licensing arrangements. The tie is the result of decisions made together over years. Aklasu's job is to know enough about silk to ask the right questions, and to read the answers carefully when they come back.
The Long View
Quality and sustainability are often framed as competing values. They are not. Both lead to the same outcome: make less, make it better, and let what is made stay in service longer.
A tie woven in Como to last thirty years is a more sustainable purchase than three ties bought cheaply and discarded across the same span. Restraint at the point of production is environmental, financial, and aesthetic at once. This is how Aklasu thinks about sustainability. Not as a marketing claim, but as a consequence of doing the work properly.
The Two Instincts
Designed in Canada. Made in Italy. Shipped from Canada.
The line is more than a provenance trail. It is a working description of how the house thinks. The Canadian instinct is for clarity, restraint, and steady competence. The Italian is for craft, patience with material, and inherited touch. The combination produces a wardrobe that draws no attention to itself.
