Geometria is the pattern that put Anaskela on the map. People sometimes assume it was designed in a Monday morning. In fact it took three years, two full redesigns and seventeen production prototypes to arrive at the version we ship today. Here is the story.

2017: the sketch

Sofia drew the first version of Geometria on a paper napkin in a Faliro cafeteria. The brief was simple: a pattern that referenced classical Greek key motifs without looking like a tourist souvenir, and that worked at scale on cloth. The napkin version has about half the elements of the final design and a very different colour palette (black on cream).

Over the next few weeks the napkin became a full vector in Illustrator, then a repeating tile, then a swatch book of eighteen colourways. We printed a dozen of them on cheap polyester at a local sign-maker to see which held together across a two-metre length. Twelve of them did not.

2018: the first failed production run

Our original intention was to screen-print Geometria on cotton. We produced 400 units at a small print shop in Athens. They looked beautiful. They were also useless as beach towels — the cotton was too heavy, dried too slowly and faded badly after three washes. We donated the batch to a swim school in Piraeus and started again.

“Every brand has a product in a drawer that it is quietly ashamed of. Ours was 400 beautiful but hopeless cotton towels.”

2019: the microfibre pivot

We found our mill outside Thessaloniki in early 2019. They had just switched to recycled yarn and were looking for brands to prototype with. The first microfibre prototype of Geometria came back with the design pixelated — the digital printing at the mill was lower resolution than our Athens screens had been.

We spent four months tuning the artwork — thickening the thinnest lines, adjusting the contrast between hero and background elements, redoing the registration marks — to work with the digital printing head at the atelier that eventually took over our printing in Piraeus.

2020: launch

We soft-launched Geometria Cyan Wave in June 2020 to a mailing list of 1,100 people built mostly from Sofia’s Instagram. The first 300 units sold in nine days. We ran out of stock, waited six weeks for the next batch, and have more or less been playing catch-up ever since.

Today

Geometria now ships in four colourways. The design file has been through 73 formal revisions. We still change little things — this January we darkened the inner lines by about 4% to improve legibility at smaller sizes. The pattern is the same you’d recognise from the napkin, if you squint.

What we learned

Three things stuck with us from the Geometria years:

  • A pattern that works on screen may not work on cloth; always prototype at scale.
  • The right material is more important than the right design; a brilliant pattern on wrong substrate is a failed product.
  • Patience is a design discipline. The best things in our catalogue took the longest to arrive.

Geometria is also the pattern we are proudest of. It has paid our rent, it has clothed thousands of beaches, and we think it will keep going a long time yet.