We are moving again! As you know – last month we sent the first 5 final Founder’s Circle pattern files over to Sew Co. – our new ethical manufacturing partner in Asheville, NC. Today I leave for Asheville with the rolls of fabric and all the additional supplies to hand them off to their team and meet with them on logistics. This is such a milestone for us! Thank you for your support!
To recap – Sew Co. is going to sew up the first ten final blouses and carefully track the time it takes so we can FINALLY get to the amount of labor a reasonably well equipped manufacturer would take to produce a custom blouse. (Here I use “reasonable” to refer to the amount of specialized equipment and training they have. Sew Co. is known for high quality apparel but is not specifically a blouse manufacturer – which is important to us because that would set a higher bar in terms of the inputs required for other manufacturers to replicate this work and be profitable).
It also means that we will be able to begin shipping out final blouses!
This wild road began in January 2022 – well over a year ago now – with our efforts at jumping ahead to an apprenticeship program to produce custom-fit blouses. Now nearly a year and a half later we have stuck with the winding road of this work and you’ve stuck with us. We learned a lot of hard lessons but also were further vindicated in our work with the positive early results on our ability to fit blouses remotely. We now find ourselves again at the beginning – the beginning of our partnership with Sew Co.
Our work here together goes beyond 10 blouses – indeed we hope to make 100. And yet – it is not about 100 blouses either. It is about joining forces to remake the business model for delivering U.S. made apparel so that sustainable and labor friendly manufacturing can flourish in America. It is about redistributing the price of a garment so that more of it goes to the people who sew it and the people who make the fibers. It is about manufactures and brands throughout the U.S. having a model to follow to make garments that will support the creation of jobs in small communities throughout the U.S. where manufacturing and technology can join hands to CREATE jobs.
Thank you very much for believing in this work – for supporting it.
Go, fight, win.
Reid