The STACKED brand apparel story: Headline version
STACKED brand apparel aims to produce clothing for busty women with American manufacturing facilities. It is a startup by me, news photographer Alison Kirkconnell. I’m in the incubation phase and currently make clothes as a learning and proof of concept exercise while I solidify and modify my Harvard-developed business plan.
While I do expect to scale up operations in the future, right now I am making custom clothes on a singular basis. If you’re a busty woman, I’d be happy to make you a blouse, shirt or dress. Get in touch and we’ll make that happen.
The STACKED brand apparel story: Long version
Like many American women I cannot fit into store bought clothing, at least not fitted clothing, like a button down shirt, a jacket, blazer or dress. This is because for some reason unknown to me clothing manufacturers make clothes for women with a B cup. This initially made no sense to me, not in any logical or business manner, because the average cup size in the U.S. is a D so I am not alone in my frustration.
After many years someone finally said to me, well, why don’t you do something about it?
It seemed absurd really. I was a press photographer and before that I was in I.T. for 10 years creating and managing large corporate web sites. I didn’t know the first thing about clothing manufacturing or the fashion industry.
We’re all afraid of being ridiculed and rejected and I am no exception. I figured if I was going to even consider spending any time on this, I needed to have the idea completely vetted by some of the smartest people I could find. Enter the Harvard entrepreneur program. A whole bunch of smart people thought it was in fact a great idea so they helped me create a viable business plan and I learned the business base skillset to execute it.
In retrospect that was the easiest part for many reasons I now know and for many more reasons I expect to learn in the coming months and years. The resources for cut and sew operators in the U.S. are so few and they are all over capacity. They don’t have the time to hand hold a startup. Many of them are mom and pop shops and the few still in operation are scaled down versions of a bygone era of American manufacturing supremacy and the are struggling.
In 2008 96% of all clothing for the American market was produced overseas or in Mexico and Central America. I don’t have the money to go to Mexico, China and Honduras with a translator on factory fishing expeditions, especially if I don’t even have a baseline understanding about their operations.
The industry as a whole is not exactly welcoming. Finally, like anything else, when you start something brand new you have to start from the bottom. There are no shortcuts. I needed to learn the processes and the lingo and for that I first needed to learn to sew. Nothing could be further from anything I had ever done before.
It took me a couple of years to become a proficient sewer. I was unable to locate any local sewing teachers so I had to teach myself. I almost can’t believe I didn’t give up. But here I am sewing garments in my little sewing room from start to finish all by myself.
The way commercial sewers do it now is segmented: one person sews a part of the bodice, another sews another part, someone else sews the collar, someone else sews the sleeve, someone else sets the sleeve into the bodice, etc. Each of these steps believe it or not requires a different skillset.
Sewing a straight line is much easier than sewing a curve. A curve, not to get all technical and boring, is a set consisting of a concave and a convex, and it is no easy matter to join them together gracefully. It’s so challenging in fact I believe it is a part of the reason manufacturers stop at a B cup. A D cup is exponentially more difficult to sew because it is a much deeper curve and therefore more costly to produce.
A part of me thinks that clothing companies are keeping costs low and profits high without regard to the actual wants and needs of the consumers. Clothing is after all a basic necessity like shelter, food and water. Even if someone is a nudist they still need body cover against the sun in the southern regions and the cold in the northern ones. They figure they have a captive audience. And they do.
Anyway, back to production.: factories are just now starting to implement lean manufacturing practices, which in real world terms means they are having a single sewer produce a garment from start to finish. This requires the sewer to have a broader skillset so the labor costs more but that is leveled out by a reduction in stop time (i.e. a runner bringing pieces from one sewer to the next).
I digress a little but I thought it was important you have an understanding of the industry to gauge where I’m at now and how far I have to go.
Let’s get back to those curves. I’m at the point now where I produce beautiful seam finishes on curves. At this rate however a piece would wholesale at around $250, clearly not sustainable. I can sew and finish a straight or slightly curved seam in 2 steps. The curved seams require 6 steps. I spend a lot of time looking into ways to reduce the steps from 6 to 2 or 3 without affecting quality, which would dramatically reduce the labor. There has to be a way and I will find it.
Then it’s a matter of indentifying the delta between non-industrial and industrial sewing times due to faster and more powerful equipment and skilled labor.
That’s where I’m at. My patternmaking skill is the next thing I need to master. Right now I’m making one off pieces with actual bodies and adjusting patterns on the fly. I need to fully comprehend how to make that scalable and repeatable before I go hiring someone to do it for me.
My ultimate goal is for women to be able to buy a blouse or a dress or a jacket in a store or online and have it fit. Just fit. The clothes will be solid, well constructed with moderate feminine details. Ideally I’d like to open a cut and sew facility in N.H. or MA. I’m going to find a way to make it economical to manufacture here. Many people tell me this is impossible. It is not impossible. I’m not curing cancer or time traveling. I just want to make clothing for busty women in the U.S. with American labor. I hope to redefine that word “impossible”.
I have no idea why or even how I remember this but I do, and vividly at that: when I was in grade school the teacher rolled this tiny TV on a giant cart into class and we watched something about visions of the future. One of the predictions was that one day people would be able to see each other while talking on the phone. That was pretty radical at the time- a real leap into science fiction. We had these big telephones sitting on a desk or hanging on the wall attached to a short cord. Where the phone was is where you talked on the phone without moving. So here we are. Skype, Facetime and videoconferencing tools are a part of daily like for millions of people. And yet it was viewed by most, even in the scientific community, as an impossibility.
I’ll get there when I get there and when I do get ready for a whole new way of buying clothes for the American average D cup women.
This is my journey. Come along for the ride.