Made with Intention

People often ask where our prints come from. The short answer is: from us. Every print you see at Ola Azul is drawn by hand, in house, by our design team and the artists we invite to work with us.

The longer answer is the story of how a collection is made.

It starts with a story

Every collection begins with a story before it has a single drawing: a place, a memory, a feeling we want to carry into a season. That story gives the collection its name and its palette. Ubud and Bay started this way, like every collection we make: a few words and images pinned to a wall.

From there, the drawings begin. Flowers, leaves, borders and small motifs are painted and sketched by hand, scanned, and slowly composed into a print.

The body is our canvas

This is the part that makes our prints different. Many of them are what we call engineered or placement prints. Instead of repeating a pattern across a roll of fabric and cutting pieces from it, we design the print for the exact shape of each garment.

That means the central flower lands at the center of a one piece, a border follows the neckline of a top, and the print wraps the hip of a bikini bottom instead of being cut off at a seam. On pieces like Avery Ubud or April Ubud, you can see how the drawing was made for that silhouette and no other.

Some prints go one step further. In collections like Ember, the color fades across the piece in an engineered ombré, so no two parts of the swimsuit look quite the same.

Color with intention

We love color, but we use it carefully. Each palette is chosen to work with skin and sun, and to repeat across a collection so a top, a pareo and a shirt from the same story feel like they belong together, even when the prints change. That is why you can wear the Nina Bay shirt over a Bay swimsuit and it looks like one idea.

Finished by hand

When a print is ready, the details come last: beads, embroidery, pom poms and tassels, many of them added by hand. They are small, but they are what make a piece feel made rather than produced. You will find them on Kenya's side ties, on the beaded pearls of Blake, and on the corners of our long pareos.

Embroidery is the slowest part of all. It is done entirely by hand, stitch by stitch, and some pieces take more than 24 hours to finish. It is the one step we would never rush, because it is where a print stops being flat and becomes something you can feel.

A print made for one body, one shape and one story.

So the next time you pick an Ola Azul piece, look closely. Somewhere in it there is a drawing that started on our table, made only for you to wear.