This article in the AZ Republic came out about how the fashion industry doesn’t bring in any significant money to the AZ economy. Luckily, we had the opportunity to share that LabelHorde’s mission is to change that and that the ultimate reason we started LabelHorde was because we watch local brands leave the state and spend their money in California manufacturing their collections when they could be staying in AZ and spending their money here. Thankfully we’ve had the opportunity to move into the Diego Milano Sew Haus and now we can change that and start offering manufacturing to the local brands and provide jobs to the workers and keep this money in the state. We are starting with incubation services to help these brands understand the manufacturing process first. But we still need to work out the kinks at Sew Haus in order to be able to take on everyone’s manufacturing work… which will take time and we could use some financial support for this as well. One example is that we have the Gerber system needed to create patterns, size them (grading), and print them on markers for production cutting (instead of doing this all by hand which costs more and takes longer), but we don’t have the digitizer to copy someone’s existing pattern to get it into the gerber system. We want to purchase this and would need help with that. In the meantime, we have to do those things by hand which ultimately costs the designers more. Also, if we had a larger space to work out of, we could offer more office rental/co-working as well as event space which would bring in consistent chunks of income that would support all of these other things that cost money that we need to do. So, we could use about 10,000 sq. ft. of unique/interesting space where people would want to have their fashion shows and other events. We could use assistance with this. All of this could be supported by the local government…and then they’d see the impact that fashion could make on the economy….like the other states mentioned in the article.
Here's everything else that happened this week:
4 fashion business start-up consultations 4 sewing/sketching lessons Sold 1 fashion illustration book 3 fashion businesses joined our AZ fashion directory and they all chose to pay for the upgraded listing to show their support and help contribute to our success as a community 1 designer moved in and is renting a space in our co-working office We worked out wholesale arrangements 2 authors to sell their booksand 1 supplier to sell design studio supplies to the local designers We added 2 fashion jobs to our AZ Fashion Jobs Classifieds page We contracted out a freelancer to do some pattern grading (sizing) for a local brand We took on a custom design We took on a custom garment dye job We found an expert who knows Gerber to come in and get familiar with the Gerber system at Sew Haus so we can start offering it to the local designers We are producing a future sports fashion event for ASU’s Emerge event 7 local brands reached out to discuss manufacturing at Sew Haus And we were included in this AZ Republic article which will hopefully lead to some financial support for us to grow and be able to be everything that we could potentially be and won’t need to turn anyone away for manufacturing.
It's happening!!!