As a clothing rep, marketer and writer for eco-designers for the past 5 years, I am fully aware of the experienced and not so experienced, minimums and production based on properly cut patterns.
I’m completely in agreement there and am absolutely not lambasting anyone!
I just think the younger designers just coming into the eco-design world need help with finding sustainable fabrics from the right places.

I was just on the phone with Pickering Natural last night and who I will be interviewing for next week’s post and learned a lot more than what I thought I did regarding fabric, sourcing and minimums.

Thanks for all your great feedback on this topic.

The real problem is this: because they don’t want to do the heavy lifting and try to get someone who has information to help them, the second person isn’t going to do it. The reason is that referrals are considered an endorsement in this business. The person who gives you a referral is lending you their influence. If you’ve already proven you’re not willing to follow previous advice they’ve given you, they’re not going to give you anymore. Here’s an entry called How to find help in the apparel industry for almost nothing that explains this.

The point is, people who know stuff want to hang out with people on their same level, who can help them with their problems. It’s not that it’s a secret but if you want it, you have to join them. The door’s open. It’s not that they’re selfish. I could spend all day long answering these questions on the web for free but then I’d be out of business.

Amyd: If you’re going to write an article about designers potentially pooling their resources, you really should read something about minimums. It’s not what people think. Sure, it’s easy to look at it one-sided and lambaste the powers that be but if you want a workable solution, a meeting in the middle, you must understand the constraints of their operations. The TRUTH is that contractors have minimums because small designers are too inexperienced to practices and protocols in the trade and it costs much more to service them. As a service provider myself (yes, I’m one of these people being blamed), you don’t know how often I get patterns that can’t possibly be sewn in production, none of the pieces match, they don’t include a basic checklist like a cutter’s must. They don’t indicate specs, packages come incomplete, they don’t have markers, and they have no idea what something basic like a cut order is or how to do one.

I have many eco-designers ask me about fabric sourcing and dyeing (where other designers go) and I see it as a positive thing to share so that their costs will go down when the demand is greater at one place.

You can understand why designer’s do it but it’s really not necessary.

Stay tuned for a post I’m writing next week that touches this topic a bit.

Time to get these designers sharing resources and not being so secretive.

And believe me, being friends with many of them I preach this often.

Apparel is unique among consumer products in that there are rarely middlemen involved in transactions, particularly among smaller producers. There are rarely wholesalers, the nature of trend driven products and short selling windows makes this untenable even if the margins were there. People just assume there are middlemen because this function is imbued in the sale of nearly all other consumer products. Nearly all apparel products are sold by manufacturers to retail stores or consumers directly sans middlemen. This is not to say manufacturers don’t have sales support as do all producers but sales people do not buy the products for subsequent resale to other parties, adding their own mark up on the transaction. Rather, sales people *take orders* for future delivery, a service for which they derive commissions.

Conversely, sewn products -such as dog collars for example- can be resold via middlemen because these items aren’t seasonally driven; product styling remains relatively static over a period of time.

Rather, the key to lowering costs in apparel production is better management (usually better product design and industrial engineering of processes) and to some extent, improving economies of scale. Small producers, being newer at the game, rarely have the acumen or resources to produce quality commensurate to the value represented by producers of other items of complimentary price points.

Nobody ever asks why the designers in the “other” part of the fashion industry create expensive clothing but always with eco.
My guess is that it sticks out more which is fina as it’s all the more reason to let people know just what did go into it.

Many designers I write about are wonderful women who work hard to put out their seasonal collections, care about doing it all here in the U.S. and love the fact they’re doing what they love and with a small carbon footprint.

They pride themselves on creating real fashion forward designs with new, cutting edge fabrics.

So yes, posts like this help me put them on a pedestal to prove how great they are but also to get you the readers to shop them because when you invest in them, they can create another collection.

Hopefully, we’ll at some point be in a place where all we wear is eco-fashion and thanks to our demand for it, prices will go down for them to manufacture and for us to consume.

I’m very much of the mind that our perception of “expensive” has been skewed by decades of mass-consumerism that has given us cheap products with a frankly pathetic use-life. Eco-fashion is a market of quality goods that do (or should) truly last. Quality is worth paying for. On top of that, the fact they’re produced with green principles in mind is another reason to pay “extra”.

But telling people that they should expect to pay more for their goods, in the middle of a recession – that’s a challenge.

But we need to get away from clothing that is (a) far too cheaply sold, and (b) sold in a way that lines the pockets of countless middlemen. Yet, how do we get that message across to someone eyeing up a $3 T-shirt at their local market? All these designers show one answer: total transparency. Find a way to describe to the consumer (in places like this site) exactly how things are made – what the true cost is.

(Shameless self-plug to an article I wrote that really woke me up to the true cost of some everyday things).