It is a question I get asked surprisingly often, and I have to say it is one that genuinely interests me. You see, when you spend as many years as I have working in the custom ties industry, you start to notice patterns — not just in fabric and weave, but in the way design thinking migrates from one product category to another. And I would say that nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship between custom ties and the growing world of corporate scarf design. 

Back in the day, the necktie was the undisputed king of corporate identity. From the 1960s through the 1980s, as South African companies began developing stronger brand identities, corporate ties became the go-to symbol of organisational belonging. A company's colours, its crest, its very DNA was woven or printed into a tie, and that tradition shaped an entire industry. At Vinuchi, we have been part of that story for a long time, and I can tell you from direct experience that the discipline required to produce quality custom ties — the attention to colour matching, the precision of motif placement, the balance between brand identity and wearability — is extraordinarily rigorous. Don't get me wrong, it is not an easy thing to get right, and many tie manufacturers have come and gone precisely because they underestimated how demanding the process really is. 

Now here is where it gets interesting. These days, as scarf production has expanded and more organisations, schools, and sports clubs are looking for branded accessories beyond custom ties, designers and clients alike are turning to the logic of custom ties for guidance. And that makes complete sense when you think about it. Custom ties have solved a very specific design problem: how do you take a corporate or institutional identity and translate it faithfully onto a narrow, vertical textile canvas that needs to work in formal, semi-formal, and often very conservative environments? The answers the tie industry developed — repeat motif placement, stripe construction, tonal colour balancing, the discipline of the crest or badge — are almost directly transferable to custom scarf design. 

One could say the scarf is simply a more generous canvas. You have more surface area, more shape possibilities, more edge-finishing options, and frankly a broader range of fabric weights to work with. But that generosity can be deceiving. I have seen organisations commission a custom scarf and approach the brief as though it were a fashion project rather than an identity project, and the results are often disappointing — busy, unfocused, and ultimately not very useful as a branding tool. The custom ties tradition teaches restraint. It teaches you that a clean stripe, a well-proportioned repeat, and a carefully chosen colour palette will outlast and outperform something that tries to do too much. 

The technical conversation between ties and scarves runs deeper than aesthetics as well. When we talk about woven versus printed construction, for instance, the choices available in tie manufacturing have directly informed how we think about scarf production. A woven custom tie carries a depth and durability that a printed tie simply cannot match — the colour is in the structure of the fabric itself, and it ages beautifully. The same principle applies to scarves, and at Vinuchi, when clients ask us whether to go woven or printed for a corporate scarf design, we often find ourselves drawing on decades of experience from the custom ties side of the business to guide that conversation. 

I would say the influence also runs in the other direction in certain respects — scarves have introduced a freedom of form and a wider range of fibre options that are slowly feeding back into how progressive tie manufacturers are thinking about their own products. Silk blends, modal, fine wool — these materials have long been standard in quality scarf production, and they are becoming more relevant to premium custom ties as well. 

What this tells me, having watched this industry evolve over many years, is that neckwear and accessory design are really part of a single, ongoing conversation about how identity, craft, and textile technology come together. Custom ties did not just solve a branding problem — they built a design language that continues to influence everything that comes after it. And as that language finds its way into scarves and beyond, I think the industry will be richer for it.