Introduction
During my trip to Norway, I bought a chunky wool Dale of Norway sweater. This spawned a love and long running search for more chunky wool sweaters. While reading through reddit threads, I found a review of a sweater ordered from the website souwestchunkies.com (now defunct), and it looked amazing. Ordering involved emailing the site owner with measurements, and he’d have a very chunky sweater made to fit you perfectly. I had to give it a try.
Placing the Order
I reached out, he replied.
The next few emails, all within the same day, covered rough shipping location, my personal measurements, and colors I was considering. Then, radio silence for 5 days until I got this.
After some back and forth, we realized he only had enough maroon for a thinner ‘Gansey’ style sweater, but I’ve set my mind on a ‘chunkie’ so we decided on green. The next few emails discussed the exact shipping address. Due to the fact that I don’t have a proper mail room in my apartment, I decided to get this shipped to work to make sure the package arrived safely. This was confusing because my work shipping address is formatted as such:
Varun Mangalick c/o Jane Street
250 Vesey St, 6th Floor
New York, NY 1028
The mention of both Jane Street (the company) and Vesey St (the street) led to some confusion.
At the start of that discussion, I had asked about how I would actually pay him, though I hadn’t gotten a response. I asked for a price estimate and got a breakdown by labor cost, wool cost (by weight), and shipping cost along with a guarantee that he would “NEVER EVER ASK FOR PAYMENT UNTIL SWEATER ARRIVES NO MATTER IF IN USA, CHINA, AUSTRALIA, THE WORLD”. With that, I told him to proceed with the order. An hour later, he emailed me letting me know that he just received a new roll of wool in a natural and undyed grey marl. I was intrigued, so I sent the color to my brother, my mom, and Neha, and all three of them liked it more than the green, so I emailed Peter for a last minute color change. With that, the order was finally complete! He sent one final, heartfelt message before starting the order.
Receiving the Sweater
The next few weeks were generally quiet with a couple emails letting me know that the sweater was in progress, and later, that it had left the building. As we approached the actual delivery date, I got a concerning series of emails.
Turns out, there was some confusion since USPS reported the package as delivered, but I had not actually gotten it. In addition, since I had this shipped to the Jane Street office, Peter called reception to confirm delivery. He requested that I talk to them, so I ran upstairs to try to settle things/apologize to reception and caught them as they were on the phone with him. They had apparently thought this was a scam, as Peter was somewhat exasperated on the phone, but I explained the situation to reception and they explained to Peter and me that our packages get sent to a courier and come to us the next day. When the package actually arrived, I would be notified via email. The receptionist’s opinion of Peter improved considerably when I told her he hadn’t actually let me pay for this hand-knit sweater yet.
The next day, before receiving an email, I got a call from reception. All they said was, “it’s here”. I ran upstairs to the mailroom where they were unloading packages and we opened it immediately. It was huge and itchy and perfect! I had the receptionist take a picture so I could email Peter right away. and hopefully figure out how to pay him. He continued to make this difficult.
Epilogue
This sweater and the whole experience surrounding it was everything I could have hoped for. The sweater itself weighed 4.2 pounds, and with it, I have found the limit of how chunky of a sweater I can wear. I have obtained enough sweaters for now, but next or the following winter, I plan on getting another chunky in another color and style. I emailed Peter to check what else he could do, and based on his response, my options are wide open.
