May 2024

Welcome back to our slightly sporadic accounts of what it’s like building an apparel factory from scratch. I feel like this are like the too-long mass-printed Christmas letters you get from your childhood neighbor that update you on the comings and goings of their lives that you're not really plugged into but you kinda think are interesting. Maybe?

Last time I updated you was a couple months ago and we had just hit our one year anniversary of doing this thing of taking production back in-house (well, half of it). I was reflecting at how much had changed since we started, and today I’m reflecting on how much has changed since I last updated you all!

Mid-spring saw some pretty tough personnel challenges for our small team. Our production team saw 2 people come and 2 people go and the exhaustion of hiring and training and constantly searching for our dream team really set in for us. As a whole, this year has felt very hard, but March and April have been the hardest. Like moving through sticky sludge – nothing has come easily and everything feels like a fight and a struggle. But we’re swimming along as a team of 7.

One MAJOR challenge that has existed all along for us is the ability to repair our machines. There is not a single industrial sewing machine mechanic in our area, and to our knowledge in Montana in general. Sewing industry businesses in our state either have their own, or fly in people from out of state to do repairs. And that just didn’t sound like a great solution for us. When equipment is down, we need it back up and running ASAP!

We’ve been having sooo many frustrations with our coverstitch machines over the last couple of months. They’re constantly skipping stitches and it’s resulting in a lot of inspecting and repairing work for us. And we just couldn’t seem to get to the bottom of why it was happening! But we had a solution on the books and we just had to patiently wade through the spring to get there.

Sewing Machine Mechanic School!

Last week, we received a weeklong on-site training at our factory and it was a game changer. We hired America’s 21^st to fly their lead mechanic Ruben out for the week to get us trained and up to speed on how to fix our own shit AND finally get our flatlocks operational. We bought these things a year ago and haven’t had the capacity or human power to put them into operation, but it’s happening this summer!!

Both Sarah and Vicky are now able to work on all of our machines and make every possible adjustment you could think of. And they have the certificates to prove it. If you’re running a sewn goods business and want your team to have the same skills, we highly recommend Ruben and his team for training – they do on-site or in their shop in South Carolina. We learned an enormous amount and had a ton of fun doing it.

And the best part? Our machines are working seamlessly now so our production team has been zooooooming along and we’ve had zero repairs.

The other big thing that’s happened this spring is that we took on our largest production run in The Youniverse to date – nearly 1000 pieces for our April Drop. As is always our story, we started behind and are still catching up but we had  a couple weeks to make all the shorts and tees before last month’s launch and we did it! Nearly. Some of you had to patiently wait for your shorts but I really hope they were worth it. These shorts have been such a labor of love.

We priced them to take 26 minutes to make per pair. And we got locked into those prices a long time ago, like last year.

But when we started making them we quickly realized the zipper pockets were a lot more complicated than we thought – they needed extra reinforcement to make them stable and easy to sew. Which meant we had to get additional fabric, cut it and attach it. All adding additional time. To the tune of an extra 20 minutes per pair. But we’re selling A TON of them! Which makes up for it. Kind of.  We’re super proud of them and are loving seeing them out in the world on you.

We’re not gonna get too excited until the deal is done (because we all know what happened last time), but let’s just say The Youniverse might be relocating. To a way better location that suits us more. The hunt for a more permanent home has been three years in the making, but we might finally be getting to the end of the hunt!

That's all for now. Thanks for following along!

-Mallory-

founder, Chief Everything Officer