On Garment Production

If someone had told me last September, when I finished my first prototypes, that it would take me nearly a year to get the clothes into production, I would have treated it as a bad joke. And yet, here I am, eight months later, and the job is still not done!

It doesn't help that I've had to learn how to launch and operate a business along the way (and I've still a lot to learn on this front!). I typically put in 80 hours of work a week to stay on top of both my jobs, my university job and my fashion business. I get to do some design work, but far less than before I started my own company.

The trickiest thing about doing this is getting the garment production on track and up to speed. In retrospect, I spent about four months working on moving the garments forward more or less on my own, whereas that work might have been done more profitably and faster by experts. I have now been referred by one of the businesses with which I'm working for the sewing, to a full time "patternist", someone who works with patterns 24/7. Although this feels a bit like a setback, in fact I think this is going to move things forward faster, once we get the "bugs" out of the patterns I've developed on my own. She's going to do the grading to get different size versions as well as clean the pattern up.

Before I started, lots of people said to me, "you don't need to sew to be a designer - you get other people to do the manufacturing". Sounds simple and straightforward, but the reality if far from this. In reality, it's a good thing that I can sew, and manipulate patterns, even if I'm not doing the final work. In reality, the more "techniques" you can do yourself, the more control over the whole process you have. Even with these advantages, however, it takes weeks, months even, to develop the set of contacts and business partners you really need to have a "production chain" in place. In addition, everyone seems to think that they "know better" than I do - I constantly have to "fight" to get my ideas/needs/goals recognized and keep them front and centre, even though I hold the purse strings! As in many other industries with which I've worked, people have a "standard" way of doing things, and when you innovate and step outside of normal practice (which is what innovating means!), people resist. It is a real struggle to get them to work with you, rather than working at cross purposes or even, in some cases, against you!

I'm not at the end of my learning curve in this regard, but already with what I know now I would start "at the other end" of the production chain and work backwards if I could do it all over again! That is to say, I'd start with the patternist, work back to the manufacturer and then work with the seamstress to get the prototypes ready... It sounds "backwards" but it would be far more efficient than the process I've used. Still, I had to go through it to learn the "right way" to get things to work!

It also doesn't help that the garment manufacturing business in North America is in a shambles, due to the offshoring of manufacturing contracts. Although the tide is beginning to turn on this, the past decade has led to massive bankruptcies in the garment industry, and finding reliable outfits to do the work is a real challenge. In Quebec City, for example, the manufacturing businesses that are still in operation have specialized, for the most part, in providing medieval garments for the burgeoning cosplay movement, or into developing uniforms and specialized garments for industry.

Maybe by August we're going to be "in business", that is, finally selling our products, but it's been a long haul to get all of this underway. And you have to be persistent, keep your moral up, and push and push until you get things to work. Otherwise, we'd still be at it next year without any products for sale!

I have a whole new respect for businesses that break into the "garment business" and make a successful go at it. There is nothing particularly "simple" about it. I still get a great deal of satisfaction out of each major step forward, and am looking forward to the day when our products are actually available in our online store (also under development). But it's been a tougher road than I expected, even knowing it was going to be tough!

The Joys (and Challenges) of Moving Forward

Time to give an update on how things are progressing!

On my iPhone, I now have a ToDo list that is subdivided into the different categories of what a business needs and does : Management, Administration, Marketing, Sales, Design, and Production. I propose to follow these rough categories to give you an update on how things are going.

Management : By management I mean resources management, of which there are roughly three types currently - staff, finances and inventory. In early February I hired a part-time assistant who's been very productive at getting a whole set of initiatives moving forward while I've been handling design, some marketing issues and also keeping my university career on the ball. I also now have a bank of three going on four or five couturiers/couturières (seamstresses and/or tailors) who I can call on to help with prototype development and the early vetting of production garments. The funding got worked out, although I am still finding dealing with the accounting software to be a major challenge. I think hiring a part-time accountant will be a priority once we start to generate some revenue. Finally, there is no inventory to speak of yet, but we are negociating to rent some office & storage space so that when the inventory does start to arrive we have the space to put it! We shall be acquiring a computer and phone as well for the office in the next few weeks. Also, we obtained a CA # for our clothes, a Canadian legal requirement for the clothing industry.

Administration : By administration, I really mean the top-level meetings, issuing shares and so on. Not a lot going on right now.

Marketing : I have put on a major effort to get an online presence established, and this is going quite well. I have a website with an active blog and a twitter presence that channels back to the blog and website. I've done quite a lot of SEO tweaking and the results are beginning to pay off. Viewership of the website is now above 100 a week and climbing steadily, with a moderate to low bounce rate (40%) and along average viewing time (16 minutes and 12 pages despite the bounce rate) - people are clearly looking at the whole site and not just the blog postings. This bodes well for an online store. I'm also negociating with a company to do the online store after spending some time preparing a website design brief that explains in detail what I want. Locally, I've been promoting the business mostly by word-of-mouth, through my different communities. I am almost finished organizing a Facebook page for the business as well. Also, a newsletter will be issued shortly.

Sales : None yet, of course, but interest is running quite high. We are just in the process of finishing up the first production prototypes, and these will help us garner interest among small boutiques in the region. I've developed a coding system for the garments - the first production run is quite complex and the codes will be needed to make sense of the production and to keep track of where things are at.

Design : Design has been the bottleneck in moving forward, but I've found to my chagrine that it can't be rushed. I can put in at most about three hours a day on design. Then my brain cells start complaining about the intensity of the work! But the first line of garments is (almost) finished, while the first two models of the second line of garment are also more or less completed and ready for production.

Production : While the whole production process was quite mysterious to begin with, we've more or less worked out most of the kinks and know how and where to go to do this, how much time it takes, and more or less how much it costs. We know what labels need to be made and where to make these, and are in the process of working out packaging requirements. We expect to be in production for the first batch of the first garment line by the end of March.

Our local (Quebec City) launch event won't be in April, but we believe we can meet a deadline in mid to late May now. Our online launch date will be several weeks after the local event as the online store will take a bit of time to develop and, hence, we will be able to use the photos and video footage from the launch event on our online site.

The stress levels have come back down to a more or less reasonable level, while the excitement factor remains high. The adventure continues!