Incubating sewn product and fashion businesses in New Mexico
Many months after the fact, I’m pleased to report that we manufactured over 200 pairs of pants for donation to needy New Mexico school children. Our weak link continues to be distribution (giving away free stuff is harder than you’d think) but these should be going to their new homes before the end of the month along with the coats we just made. Here is a picture of the Spring 2017 Boot Camp staff:
Above: L-R, Faith, Susan, Jamie, Eric and Jane. This is what 100 coats looks like.
Late in coming, here is a report of the apparel manufacturing boot camp that was held over Labor Day, 2016.
We, the project organizers, feel that this was our most successful event yet. Attendees agreed, rating it 4.95 out of 5. 100% said they would recommend this event. 95% plan to return (the lone exception has a factory to run and can’t get away). I’ll include some comments from attendees at close so scroll down for those. We successfully completed 70 coats in 4 days. We had inspected, inventoried and hung the last 30 coats by 11 AM the following morning. The most dramatic indicator of success was the very low defect rate, namely 4% and these were very minor details such as a label needing a corner tacked down. Contrast this with our first boot camp in which only 3% of our coats passed inspection. Yes, we were too embarrassed to admit that our defect rate was 97%, some errors being quite grave. We did fix them all before delivering them to our “customers” but it took 4 of us, about 4 week ends to do it.
We didn’t have a dream team this time; we actually had half the staff (22) of the first event. Here is a break down of our attendees: Read More
