She sells bespoke sweaters, although she stops taking orders when her backlog becomes too long.

Knitting and finishing a single sweater takes her 20 hours or more, and “designing the shape, writing the knitting instructions takes approximately 3 hours and the color and pattern design anything from 8 hours to a month, depending on the complexity.”

She can produce 30-40 bespoke garments a year and has a 3 year backlog. Her story and sweaters can be found here. 

To make Fair Isle garments more accessible, to create a sustainable source of income for islanders, and to pass on the legacy of Fair Isle knitting, she has created her MV Collection. Profits go toward preserving the heritage of Fair Isle knitting by bringing apprentices to the island to teach.

Instead of being knit at home by hand, the sweaters in the MV collection are knit on industrial machines on Shetland’s mainland. These sweaters start at $200+. Her designs made on 1960’s hand machines start at $650+. Obviously, her bespoke sweaters are substantially higher.

The MV Collection is limited in that it doesn’t offer traditional Fair Isle sweaters, but it’s “linked to the history and tradition of Fair Isle through the patterns, the wool, the style.”

She makes the point that Fair Isle patterns are replicated by clothing manufacturers and on catwalks every year, “but none of those garments have a relationship to Shetland or Fair Isle.”

Mati has reason to be leery of mainstream designers. Two Chanel employees visited her shop. After making it clear that they weren’t wanting to copy her designs, she sold them some sweaters.

Shortly after, the 2015 Chanel collection by Karl Lagerfeld showcased Fair Isle designs using the design that she’d developed for the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in 2012.