Thread Talks
For many seasons now, we’ve been trying to figure out how to offer our bestselling Treasure Dress in a version that could be worn year-round. And we’ve finally done it thanks to a super special, wildly soft and very technical...
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?
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.
One year ago, I was heading out on a trip thinking “I can’t leave right now, what was I thinking. Was this a bad idea? Can we really do this? It needs so much more before it’s going to work”....
Well, we made a men's hoodie. There’s a big story behind this hoodie. We swore we’d never make a men’s silhouette, but one guy changed that. Greg Seitz, a dear friend and longtime Youer supporter voluntarily put a $50 deposit...
It's been nearly 1 year since we started this Youniverse – the wacky factory where we make clothes in Missoula Montana. After a decade of working with contract factories across the U.S., we thought we could do it better (I...
Ok, well I have to admit I was completely unrealistic when I decided back in March that I would write an entry in our production diaries once a week. That lasted for a month. An enormous amount of wild things have happened in the last 2 months, including lots of staff changes and the acquisition of fancy new machines!
We've turned our factory into a spa - a steam room to be exact. We are learning to love the often overlooked, but oh-so-necessary tools of the trade (and the inspection table) - the steam iron and the steamer. To be honest, I didn't really know we needed these things. I just thought product came off the sewing line looking super perfect and professional and went right into a bag. Nope! Here's how that's done.
"We need a language", Sarah so perfectly put it. And we sure did - a production language that everyone could understand.
After unsuccessfully looking around the internet, it became clear we would have to develop our own factory language. The Youniverse doesn't have a single production manager, so we needed a language that empowered everyone in the factory be autonomous and directive of their own projects
Here's what happened this week while we created one.
