This time last year, I was writing a story summarizing the wild journey of bringing our Ambition Anorak to market. It was a celebratory post – about overcoming great obstacles in product development to finally bring a dream product to life.

 

And today I’m writing another story about the Ambition Anorak. A saga, this one less triumphant. A real dumpster fire of a month – March 2024. Here’s everything that we’ve been through in the last 20 something days. But there is a major lesson to be learned in it.

 

We started working on our 2024 jacket a year ago. We planned the fabrics and the prints, got lab dips and strikeoffs to test all the colors and chose some incredibly cool neon zippers and cords. The combo of black and our periwinkle-esque Alpen alongside a classic print (Long Strange Trip coming back from 2020) we fully believed would be a superseller – the jacket of the year. Here are the colors in all their glory. 

 

And for months we kept the stoke alive. Constantly exclaiming throughout the office “I can’t wait for the new anorak, people are gonna LOVE the colors!”

 

But placing it in a factory proved to be challenging.

 

The factory that made them in 2023 had since gone out of business. We were getting set up at a new (fabulous + longterm + we love them so so much) factory, but the volume (200 pieces) was too small for them to take it on.

 

We thought very critically about making them in-house (we have our own factory that’s a year old) but there were challenges. It’s a very technical garment – did we have the equipment and labor to sew it? We were already making 500 pieces in-house that month, could we handle 700? Probably not. ALSO, we make many things out of the fabric used for the anorak (Everlast) and it would be really tricky and complicated to move it through so many links of our supply chain. We determined it would be best to keep it at one factory.

 

So, against our better judgement, we went back to a factory we used last year that really didn’t follow instructions. But we thought that with careful management, we could get them to. We booked Sarah a trip to LA so she could be there for several days to oversee right as production was beginning.

 

Then, thanks to the U.S. Embassy, she got stuck in Brazil. For 2 months! That’s a story for another time, but wow have we learned lots about immigration in the last 12 months!

 

While we were furiously trying to figure out if Sarah would ever be allowed to return to her life in the U.S., the factory got started with our stuff – Success Pants & Ambition Anoraks.

 

And immediately there were problems. They couldn’t seem to make a sample that matched our pattern and wasn’t covered in grease stains, every day they were losing (and not always finding) our fabrics, and using wayyyyy more material than they should have needed.

Meanwhile, the delivery date on the purchase order hit – and we found out they hadn’t even started making our stuff! Even though they had received everything 2 months ago!

 

We then panicked, because we rely on monthly drops for revenue and if we miss one then they all get squished together which is really tricky to orchestrate.

 

Finally Sarah got out of Brazil, right as the factory somehow lost all of the printed fabric they would need for the pants waistbands – thousands of dollars worth of fabric.

 

So, I (Mallory) basically met Sarah at the airport and we turned around and went to LA to see what the hell was happening there and try to get production going.

 

From the moment we landed the trip was a disaster. We rented a terrible minivan that took 2 hours and 2 shuttles to pick up because I have a commercial auto insurance policy and and American Express – 2 things that Allied rental doesn’t seem to like lol.

 

We get the van and immediately start in on locating some of this missing fabric.

We drive all around our supply chain getting things from storage and the cutter and replacing what’s missing so the factory can at least start.

We find out the anoraks are being made at another facility, and that we can’t see it until the morning. We’re warned it’s a “temporary space that’s not great” but we’ve seen some shit so we think “how bad can it really be?”. We go see the pants being made (they started!) and they’re looking good so we feel accomplished at the end of the day.

 

The next morning we’re taking to the “factory” where the jackets are being made. And we’re shocked. “Not great” was a bit of an understatement. No doors or windows, just an iron gate that glides across an alley entrance, cockroaches on the broken concrete floor, machines piled with junk (one straight stitch had mouthwash, a bowl of ramen, a cup of coffee, a box of envelopes, 2 bottles of hand sanitizer and some peroxide chillin on it) and 2 women sewing while sitting in broken folding metal chairs. We were horrified.

 

We put our horror aside and thought  “we just need to get these jackets out of here”. We grabbed one (size small) to take with us for photos on the way to the airport so we could MAYBE get this launch going.

 

We stopped for photos at a park while we waited for our flight. Then I put it on, and could barely get it over my head. And the sleeves were too short. And too tight. And it had the wrong cuffs. And the stitching on the sleeves was all wrong. Noooooooooooo!!! We immediately reached out and told the factory “we have problems” and heard no problem solving happening.

Then Sarah lost her favorite earring. Then our flight got delayed.

 

We then proceeded to be stuck in LA for 7 more hours while our flight got delayed over and over again. We finally made it to Salt Lake City at 2:30 am, got a hotel for 3 hours, then got back to the airport to fly home to Missoula.

 

When we landed, we still had zero answers about what the hell was happening with the jackets but we went to the Youniverse to debrief with the rest of the team. Were they all measuring small? Were they cut wrong? Could they measure and count and get back to us?  

 

They could not. Over the next week, we got zero answers except a whole bunch of random emails with no subject line and only photos.

 

But 5 days later they did send us a size run so we could measure ourselves. And we deduced that 100% of the anoraks were cut wrong. They were all ruined. We don’t know how this happened, and they don’t seem to want figure it out for us, but we suspect they had file conversion problems and neglected to confirm measurements before cutting (our pre-production sample was perfect btw). They can’t ‘recut’ the fabric, because we have that fabric custom milled just for us and it takes 5 months to make. What we got, it what we got.

 

So, we told them to stop putting cuffs on them, put them in boxes and send them to us.

 

So here’s where we are today! We have 200 jackets arriving today that we have to re-cut cuffs for and attach. We’ve decided to scale the sizing (L becomes M, M becomes S) so they fit more similarly to what we expected, so we’ll be relabeling them too.

 

These are far from what we imagined launching to you. But we put so much effort in to get them here, plus the colors are chef’s kiss. They’re certainly not ‘first quality’, so we’re calling them Quirky Anoraks and steeply discounting them. They’ll all be launching Thursday on ‘final sale’ for $99 (not the $166 we had planned) and you’ll be able to get a little slice of our efforts in some pretty colors and prints.

 

But the biggest learning of all?! WE SHOULD HAVE MADE THESE OURSELVES. We didn’t trust our own abilities and capacity enough and instead made a massive mistake in trusting someone else to do them better. NEVER AGAIN! If this jacket makes it to a third season, we will ABSOLUTELY BE MAKING THEM IN THE YOUNIVERSE. Not to toot our own horn, but the 2 pieces for this drop that we made (Superpower Blazer + Trailblazer Tee) were done on-time and exactly how we wanted them. Boom. Where's that little nail painting emoji when you need it?!