I’m working on an article about why wool is a superior material for outdoor sports clothing. It might sound boring as a general concept, but spend one winter in Austria. That will change your mind. Anyway, I’ve talked to a couple of companies that make wool blend stuff – long underwear, lightweight jerseys, you know. One of them is right here in Seattle – Outdoor Research (OR). I sent email to ask about their product line and in response, the PR guy invited me down to tour the factory. That’s how I got to see where gloves come from.
OR has big military contracts. Those contracts apparently still require that you make your product here in the US. The military market is the primary market that the production lines in Seattle are serving. (OR does offshore production too. Consumer demand for lower costs , they say. Don’t get me started, plus, that’s not what this is about.) Anyway, when I was there, I saw a lot of khaki colored material around.
They manufacture a few things there, apparel, mostly, but while I was there, it was gloves, gloves, gloves, from start to finish. I should have taken notes or photos, but truthfully, I was so taken with just looking at what was happening that I forgot all about my notepad. Bad journalist, bad! It wasn’t a problem, really. Because my focus for the article isn’t on manufacturing, this was just a diversion. Not that I was sorry to be diverted. Plus my tour guide totally knew his stuff and was good company.
The whole deal went kind of like this:
- A design teams consolidates the ideas around what a good gloves should be like in to a test pattern.
- The prototype seamstress puts together a sample. Lather, rinse, repeat until the design team is happy.
- A pattern is drawn up in a computer aided drafting program for the most efficient use of the raw materials.
- Huge bolts of fabric get received on the loading dock.
- The patterns are cut. Depending on the type of glove they’re making, the patterns are cut by hand or by die. Die cut is for patterns that are just too complex to do by hand. The place had shelf after shelf of hand shaped dies. They were cool.
- All the bits are batched together and passed on to the seamsters and seamstresses for sewing.
- Somewhere in the process, the logo gets embroidered on the glove. I think it must be before assembly. The machine was running but I was distracted by the sheer coolness of this giant embroidery thing to ask where in the process that happens.
- The sewed seams are taped on the Goretex taping machine.
- Random testing takes place. Tests vary for everything they make. Next to the taping machine they had this gizmo that determines whether or not air is getting through the product.
- The finished product is ‘carded’ – attached to the display card for the store.
- Orders get filled and the boxes go back out the loading dock. Products also go right from manufacturing to the store that’s at street level.
I think I got it all.
Yup, the people doing the sewing were primarily Asian ladies. Nope, it didn’t feel like a sweatshop. It was plenty light and clean in there and there are big windows all around. It wasn’t crowded, I’d say only about a quarter of the machines were going. I suspect that if every machine was in use by one of those Asian ladies, it would feel different.
I also got to see the test lab. It was locked, so my guide scampered over the wall – really, he did, saying, “I’ve had to do this before” – and let me in to the chamber of secrets. They have machines for measuring how far things can stretch, how much you have to poke something to make it puncture, how windproof or breathable materials are, how much cold their insulating products keep out, how resistant their gloves are from rope burn… One of the crazier things they do is toss an item of clothing in a washing machine with five pounds of golf balls, then wash the item for 20 hours. There’s also a tumbler that they’ll load with a couple of handfuls of crumbled brick and a jacket, to see how it holds up to abrasion. Crazy. The guy that built the tumbler left OR to go work on designing nuclear subs for the Navy.
It was really something to see the whole process, end to end. We’re pretty far removed from where our stuff comes from, so even though I wasn’t there to learn about how gloves were made, it’s not like I don’t have gloves, right?
I love doing these industry survey kind of pieces. I don’t make much money out of it, but it’s so educational! I did not know, until I started working on this piece, that PETA has asked that we boycott Australian wool because of the way the sheep were treated. One of the other guys I asked about this said, “Oh, yeah, we get our wool from New Zealand.” I did not know that breathablity, which you hear about All The Time when you look at outdoor gear, is a measurable, quantifiable thing. I did not know that the wired smell your polypro underwear gets is caused by a bacteria that’s reactivated by body heat. Did you know that? I saw the permeablity chart for various fabrics and got all annoyed that I’d been suckered in to Triple Point Ceramic, the poor man’s Goretex, as it appeared to have the lowest rating for waterproofing. No wonder I was all wet on that snow camping trip. Jeez.
Being an educated consumer is a hazard. The more I understand about what makes good product – not just marketing claims, but the science behind it – the more I question everything I want to buy. Is this the best material for the job? Is it going to last? I totally get that annoying concept that marketing is always blathering on about: Value. I totally get it.
There is so much cheap crap on the market. You can buy just about anything, have it last a season, and then, throw it away. I’m starting to advocate – and implement – a more selective purchasing program. No Cheap Crap. That’s pretty much it. Buying cheap crap leads to throwing cheap crap away. Why not cut out the middle man and just throw your money in the garbage? If you get quality stuff, you might not be able to afford as much of it, but it’s gonna last you for much, much, longer than the cheap crap you just have to replace anyway. And you’re not throwing your money in the trash.
So. I don’t really have a conclusion here. I got to see how gloves are made. It was really cool.