How Matteo's 100% Cotton Towels Are Designed and Made in Los Angeles

A Towel Made Where It’s Designed

Most towel brands separate design from production by thousands of miles. A sketch gets emailed to an overseas factory, samples come back weeks later, and the feedback loop is slow enough that small quality issues compound before anyone catches them. Matteo works differently.

Founded in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, Matteo has kept its design studio and production workshop under the same roof — or close to it — from the beginning. The sewing happens right here in Los Angeles, in a large workshop adjacent to the design studio. That proximity isn’t just a talking point; it’s the structural reason why the brand’s towels and bedding tend to hold their quality across runs. When a designer can walk twenty feet to check a finished seam, problems get caught before they become patterns.

The brand’s founder, Matthew Lenoci, started with a simple idea: make sheets from the finest textiles in the world, then manufacture them locally where every step could be watched. That philosophy extended naturally to the bath collection. Matteo’s 100% cotton towels — from bath sheets down to wash towels — are designed in Los Angeles and finished there too, even when the cotton itself travels from the other side of the world to get there.

Where the Cotton Comes From — and Why It Matters

The fabric is, by Matteo’s own description, the starting point for everything. The brand describes itself as “fabric-first” — a phrase that shows up in product notes and shapes how collections get developed. Designers travel internationally, visit flea markets, and study old textiles looking for weave structures and hand-feels worth reviving. When they find something worth pursuing, they work with specialist mills to recreate it.

For the Riviera collection — Matteo’s flagship bath towel line — the cotton comes from Brazil. The Riviera is woven using the finest Brazilian cotton on the market, a long-staple variety prized for its strength and the silkiness it develops after washing. The construction uses two warps: one for the ground structure, one for the pile. A special 2-ply yarn in the pile creates the absorbency and durability that terry towels need to hold up to daily use and repeated laundering without going flat.

At 645 grams per square meter, the Riviera sits at a weight that most hotel-quality towels aim for — substantial enough to feel genuinely luxurious, light enough that it dries between uses rather than staying damp. That GSM figure is worth understanding: cheaper towels often land between 300–400 GSM, which is why they feel thin after a few washes. The Riviera’s pile retains its loft because the 2-ply yarn has more fiber to give before it degrades.

For the Cucina kitchen towel collection, the approach is different. Inspired by an old dish cloth with an exceptional hand-feel, the Cucina uses 100% cotton in a waffle-weave and window-pane structure — designed to be extra absorbent without relying on enzymes or chemical softeners to get there. The softness is structural, not added. The Cucina collection comes in four sizes and four colorways, each garment-dyed to order.

The Garment-Dyeing Process: Why Matteo Dyes After Sewing

Most textile manufacturers dye fabric before it’s cut and sewn. Matteo does the opposite. All Matteo products are garment-dyed to order right here in Los Angeles — the fabric is cut and sewn first, then the finished pieces are dyed after they’re already assembled.

This sequence matters for a few reasons. Garment dyeing produces a softer, more relaxed hand-feel than piece dyeing, because the finished product — seams, hems, and all — goes through the dye bath together. The result is that characteristic lived-in texture that Matteo towels and bedding are known for, present from the first use rather than after a dozen washes. The process also allows for lower dyeing minimums, which means Matteo can offer a wider range of colors without committing to enormous production runs of each.

The dyes themselves are low-impact formulations, applied through local Los Angeles dye houses rather than shipped abroad for finishing. There is one honest trade-off worth knowing: because each dye lot is slightly different, two towels dyed a week apart in the same colorway may vary by roughly 10% in shade. Matteo is transparent about this. The variation is part of what makes each piece individual — and in practice, once pieces are washed and in use, the difference is barely perceptible.

After dyeing, all fabrics are meticulously finished in Matteo’s Los Angeles workshop to ensure that lived-in softness is present from the start. There’s no break-in period. The towel that arrives is already the towel it’s going to be.

Quality Control Built Into the Process

The advantage of keeping design and production in the same building is that quality control isn’t a separate department — it’s a byproduct of the workflow. The constant circulation between design and production yields a fertile creative environment and quality control that’s difficult to replicate when manufacturing is outsourced overseas.

Matteo works with leading fabric mills around the world to develop its textiles, sometimes spending years on a single fabric before it reaches production. That development process — testing weave structures, GSM weights, yarn compositions — happens in close collaboration with the mills, and the results are checked against Matteo’s standards before any fabric is cut. By the time a towel reaches the sewing floor in Los Angeles, the fabric has already been vetted.

Custom orders are also available for bath towels and table linens, which means the production system is flexible enough to handle bespoke specifications without losing consistency. For interior designers and hospitality clients sourcing in volume, that’s a meaningful capability.

The full bath collection — including bath towels, hand towels, sheet towels, and bath mats — follows the same production logic: global fabric sourcing, Los Angeles sewing, local garment dyeing, and workshop finishing. Each step is close enough to the next that problems surface quickly rather than accumulating silently across a long supply chain.

What This Means for the Buyer

Understanding the production process helps explain the price point. Matteo towels cost more than what you’d find at a department store, and the reasons are concrete rather than abstract.

First, the raw material: long-staple Brazilian cotton for the Riviera, woven at 645 GSM with a 2-ply pile yarn, is a more expensive input than the short-staple cotton used in most mass-market towels. Second, the garment-dyeing process — done locally in Los Angeles using low-impact dyes — adds cost that overseas piece-dyeing wouldn’t. Third, the sewing itself happens in a Los Angeles workshop where labor costs reflect the local market, not an offshore one.

But the cost calculus over time tends to favor quality. Cheap towels shed fibers, lose absorbency, and end up costing more in replacement frequency than was saved upfront. A towel built from the right cotton, woven at the right weight, and finished properly should hold its loft and absorbency through years of regular washing — which is exactly what Matteo’s construction is designed to do.

For anyone in Los Angeles who wants to see the product before buying, the Matteo showroom and outlet at 1000 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave. is open daily. Fabric swatches are also available for select collections, which is useful if you’re working with an interior designer or sourcing for a specific project. The full range — towels, bedding, table linens — is at matteola.com.