Hey clothes wearers! Ever wonder about the clasp that holds your pants together? 
No? Well, I do. In fact, it’s exactly this kind of thing that keeps me up a night and has preoccupied my life for four months.  I will probably sound naïve to those out there familiar with industrial fasteners but I am happy to

say that we can officially close our pants.  Enter: The #39 D.B. Die Works Hook and Bar kick press with stainless steel fasteners, made in the US of A and found in, of all places, Vancouver.  It’s heavy, big and gotta be at least 50 years old.  Never before has a piece of machinery caused such grief.  No, it didn’t take anyone’s hand off, but after months scouring the web, contacting random warehouses and bothering every industry manufacturer, she’s here.  Don’t even get me started about trawling for the hooks and bars to go with it and then custom fitting the dies. And did I mention that all the while we could have taken care of it at one place in NYC?  Like many struggling fashion industry suppliers, they don’t have a website and kind of work in the dark ages in terms of getting themselves known.  It is something we’re learning to navigate as we build our contacts and try to reinvent the structure of fashion manufacturing.  There are some businesses and insiders like Merrow, Fashion-Incubator, and Threadless   who are trying to expand and modernize the industry through competent websites, blogs, Twitter, environmental and cultural awareness, customer feedback and basic corporate transparency.  We count ourselves among this group and hope that connecting to us is a lot easier than it was for us to close our pants!

Ciao!

Katya

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.