here’s the thing:  I can’t write a regular fashion-brand-blog.  because, just like in real life, I can’t do small talk.  In fact, I’m the most boring conversationalist you’ll ever meet, because I really won’t talk about all the getting-to-know-you regular bits.

In fact, I have no idea how I’ve even got friends. ;)

Seriously though, I recognize that it’s not quite the fashion for fashion brands to have much transparency.  Secrecy is the status quo, whether it’s about suppliers, vendors, or what have you.

the irony I find in that is this:  to anyone in the industry, suppliers, vendors, etc are all readily discernible-  they list themselves in the yellow pages and on the internet.

Maybe this is because, unlike in technology or science, there can’t really be trade secrets in the apparel industry.  Clothing, for the most part, whether it’s made in my studio or in a factory in China, uses extraordinarily similar techniques. The only real difference is scale.

Contrast clothing manufacturing to this well-circulated nytimes article bemoaning why we can’t produce iphones in the US.  (again, to anyone who has worked in the technology industry, this is a ludicrous question…all the inputs are in asia.  and if we produced them in the US the waiting list might be years long for the actual customer to get a phone.  and people in the US don’t really want to work in factories.  and. and. and.)

I can set up a sewing factory in Portland Maine for a few thousand dollars.  If I want to have five sewers working fulltime, I’d need perhaps 7 or 10 machines.  With five sewers I could produce enough quantity to supply a million dollars of retail revenue. (5 sewers = 10,000 hours of work per year=  10,000 dresses or 30,000 underwear garments.)  (don’t misunderstand, I’m not at that level at all yet!)

Do the numbers really work?  In a spreadsheet they do.  I’m not sure how they work in real-life, but it’s a good exercise to explore the difference.

I can’t set up an iphone factory in Portland Maine for less then several hundred million dollars, I’d guess.