Why We Carry AS Colour (And Why It Matters for Your Brand)
Larry Railton didn’t set out to build a global apparel company. He was 30 years old, living in Auckland, and trying to get decent merch made for a friend’s band. The options were bad. The fits were wrong. The quality wasn’t there. So he built something better.
That was 2005. He called it Apparel Studio. You know it today as AS Colour.
The early days weren’t glamorous. They started by distributing an American blank brand — and immediately ran into the same problem everyone runs into. Wrong fits. Women’s sizing that didn’t work. A product built for someone else’s market. So they stopped distributing someone else’s vision and started building their own.
The three pillars they landed on were simple: fit, fabric, finish. Not marketing language. Actual manufacturing priorities. Every cut, every fabric choice, every construction decision runs through those three filters. That discipline is why AS Colour blanks feel different the moment you put one on.
Today they run five warehouses across four countries — New Zealand, Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK. What started as one guy solving a problem for a band has turned into the blank apparel brand that serious decorators reach for when the job actually matters.
What This Means for Your Order
When you bring a decoration project to Breaking Free Industries and you’re weighing your blank options, AS Colour is the answer to a specific question: what does the shirt say about us before anyone even reads the print?
Cheap blanks communicate cheap brands. AS Colour communicates that you thought about it. That you cared about the person wearing it. That the merch is part of the brand — not an afterthought.
We carry AS Colour because our clients are building real things. Brands that need to last. Teams that want gear they’ll actually wear two years from now. Causes worth putting on a shirt.
Larry built AS Colour for people who give a damn about what they put on their backs. That’s exactly who we build for too.
