For the Love of Custom is where we share our love of all things customised and personalised! Since we are a company that specialises in creating custom outerwear, it’s no surprise that we also want to shine a light on the growing mass-customisation trend. We’ll be featuring different companies that are at the cutting edge of customisation.
Pins to Kill
Pins to Kill is a Melbourne-based company that specialises in customised leggings. Founded by Linda Vydra, Pins to Kill is not only creating leggings but a community of people, bringing together aspiring individuals through the family they have created. This community includes the P2K league, a group of young performers, fitness gurus and mountaineers who are ambassadors for the brand.
Pins to Kill is very popular among dancers and cheerleaders, which is understandable given they’re in leggings about 80% of their lives. Their website features designs created by the likes of Avril Lavigne and all of the leggings are sewn and printed in Melbourne!
Electric Skulls by Avril Lavigne, Source
Let’s make something!
Customers can choose to customise pre-existing designs or upload their own photos and fully create their own! We’ll be starting off with looking at the option to ‘customise template’. This option allows you to choose a basic template pattern, which is mostly made up of colour blocks, and then add your own nickname or saying to the side of the leggings. There’s a variety of templates to choose from and the plain colours make the writing the focus of this design!
Different colour pattern options Pins to Kill
You’ll also be able to customise the inside of the waistband with a secret message. This could come in handy if you’re buying this as s gift for someone else.
Let’s be honest, we’re all really here to fully customise our leggings! This works by uploading your own images. You have the option to stretch or tile your image so you can play around with these options to create different effects. If you only use one image, it’ll end up mirrored. If you’re wanting to have a tiled design, it’s best to find an image that becomes seamless when tiled instead of having square boundaries.
To demonstrate the differences between these we’ve gone for a tile-able Pacman pattern. It’s low-key nerdy but the basic colours still make it a fashionable piece! The tiling option is a great one for if your image is irreplaceable but isn’t high enough quality to stretch on your leggings. If you’re going to stretch your image, they recommend it to be 55 x 105cm.
Here’s the image we used! Charfade
Stretched Pacman Design, Pins to Kill
Tiled Pacman Design, Pins to Kill
You can of course, still add text and customise these designs with your own nickname or word down the side of the leg like we’ve done here with a marble design. Marble is very on trend and a great idea if you want to play with creating textures and illusions with your design.
Marble design Pins to Kill
Something we love about Pins to Kill’s online software and options is that it’s really easy to navigate. It can be a bit slow at applying designs to the 3D model but it does the job. The website allows you to choose the same design for both legs (shown above) and mirror/tile it, or to choose a separate design for each leg. This allows you to have asymmetrical designs, adding yet another layer of customisation to your piece. You can get creative with this by adding different designs to each leg!
A nice pair of cats Pins to Kill
Here we’ve chosen two different tiled images and put them on different sides of the leg. It could be a great idea to put images of two of your favourite characters like Finn and Jake, Pooh and Tigger or Marlin and Dory. You could even add two different colours and create a Harley-Quinn-inspired pair!
Another way to take advantage of the asymmetry is to add the same image to each side or two halves of an image. This can help you to create a continuous scene across the leggings. Here we’ve gone for yet another iconic cat pattern (comment if you know what it’s from!) as well as a more serious art print.
Scenic view of some cats Pins to Kill
Hokusai Print Pins to Kill
If you’re feeling creative then you could even fully design your own leggings from scratch. Just open up your favourite graphic design software, such as Photoshop, and just make sure the canvas size meets the specifications listed on the website. Because you can just upload your own images, you can really start from scratch and draw your own designs, upload them to Pins to Kill and have them printed on a pair of leggings!
Apart from all this, there are several pre-made designs that you are able to simply add your name to or buy plain outright. They also have just released some high-waisted shorts, which are also available in a variety of different prints.
One of their designs, Pins to Kill
We love the idea that you can customise these leggings at a variety of different levels, making it accessible to everyone. Those who just want a unique pair can simply add their own names and images whereas those who want to create their own from scratch can upload their own designs! Pins to Kill is truly revolutionary and is one to keep an eye on in the coming years as their community grows and mass-customisation takes the lead.
Inspired by the power of custom? At Exodus Wear we work with our customers to create hoodies, tracksuits, parkas, bomber jackets and almost any other jacket you can think of! We want you to have the power and ability to create something fully unique and custom- from the colours, down to the lining! Check out our product gallery here or shop for yourself here!
If you have any questions at all we are here to help! Contact us now to get started!
