Internships

How about an internship?  Here's one at Zac Posen. I'm not in New York but I like reading through the job descriptions and daydreaming. Ahh, for a bigger city and for that city in particular...

Inspiration

If you have 15 minutes, watch this video. It tells the story of Imogene + Willie: how a couple of 'grandkids' grew a denim company in Nashville. They have an amazing workshop and store and produce in-house with 11 employees.  All that awesome and their jeans look fantastic -they custom tailor their finished jeans to fit each customer.


(Thanks for the link, Sarah and Ben. You send such great inspiration!)

Yes: Thread Usage Formulas and Needle/Thread/Fabric Weight Charts

I absolutely adore truly helpful and intelligent customer service. There's a simple kindness implicit in making things easy for customers. Who wants to be scolded for not following proper ordering protocol? To that end, here's a post from Seth Godin's marketing blog titled, ''The Shell Game of Delight'.

Perhaps today's blog entry could be filed under 'things I could have learned in school had I only taken Fashion Design and not something else,' but it's really more about companies making helpful information easily available to potential customers. As such, I was impressed by, and thankful for the information I found under the 'Technical Tools' tab at the American & Efird website. There I found all things relevant to thread purchasing: thread consumption formulas,  a fabric weight/typical thread sizes/typical needle sizes chart,  and a thread size comparison chart.

Did you know there were approximately 250 yards of thread in a pair of women's jeans?

Seam Classes

I've been daydreaming about different production possibilities and wanting to brush up on technical sewing knowledge. I can see this table of seam classes from American & Efird (found via Fashion Incubator) coming in handy!

The Price of Cotton

I knew that the price of cotton had gone up but I didn't realize by how much. I was looking around on the Afingo Blog and found this post on the rise in cotton prices. Here's a short excerpt:

"The National Cotton Council of America reports that the average world price of cotton has increased by 89% from October 2009 to October 2010. Worldwide cotton prices have skyrocketed 117% over just five years ago. Blame a perfect storm of extremely high demand and weather-wreaked crop destruction for the situation."


This might not be such a bad thing. There are many fine fibers out there. Wool slacks, anyone?

Truth Plus and Afingo

Two good finds on the internets today -Truth Plus and Afingo. I love really good industry blogs and Truth Plus is definitely one. Afingo I found through today's Truth Plus post on production practices.

 “Afingo.com is the first online platform to merge social networking and fashion industry sourcing in a stylish and functional interface. A virtual showroom, essential news aggregator, and easy-to-use manufacturing resource, Afingo.com is a vibrant community of designers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers all connecting and interacting in real-time. From sketchpad to factory to boutique rack, Afingo.com provides a unified platform as compulsively addictive as fashion itself.” (Afingo.com)