Archives for category: working life

                 SWEATSHOP SUFFERING

 

Okay, I didn’t really “suffer,” but I did spend an afternoon completing menial tasks in a Brooklyn-based industrial work space. My daughter, Kelly, owns a start-up company manufacturing menswear-inspired clothing for women. When we visited several weeks ago, my wife, Katie, and I were given the “opportunity” to help out in the sort of “all hands on deck” efforts that are the hallmark of a hungry, new company.

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Along with a potential for carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand, I gained appreciation for an oft-overlooked or taken-for-granted object, namely: the extra button that is included with new shirts. Would you believe attaching such a button, when done manually (Ralph Lauren and the like doubtless use machines), can be an eleven-step process?

 

*****

 

Some background is necessary. Kelly and her wife/business partner, Laura, are necessarily detail-oriented.   They shaped, tested, modeled, designed and discussed every aspect of their line of shirts for nearly a year before the first thread hit the first sewing machine. They aspire to provide their customers nothing less than the highest quality, sustainable, and affordable (but not too affordable) garment possible. In that way, they aim to build a following that will endure and grow.

The buttons I attached to 150 shirts, or so, were, therefore, not ordinary buttons. Sourced from the nut of a tagua tree harvested in Equador, and milled elsewhere in Latin America, they are delivered to Brooklyn in recyclable packages. Each of the company’s three styles of shirts sport a different button, naturally, selected specially for their particular color. While an undiscerning eye such as my own could not easily distinguish between buttons, I learned that buttons are to be taken seriously.

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Here’s the process: (which Kelly promises will be streamlined in the future)

  1. Take an appropriate (as designated on a computer printout referencing each shirt) button from the bag after figuring out which are “ivory” which are “bone” and which are “plain old white.” (In doing so, I felt I nearly understood, after forty years of wondering, what Procol Harem meant by “whiter shade of pale.”)
  2. Take a two-inch by one-inch paper envelope from a box of such envelopes and apply the company name, Kirrin Finch, using an ink stamp, making sure the writing appears dead-center in the front of the envelope;
  3. Place the button inside the envelope;
  4. Punch a tiny hole in the top of the envelope using a small hole-puncher;
  5. Place an adhesive tag dead-center on the back of said envelope promising: “A button and a smile from Kirrin Finch”;
  6. Disentangle a four-inch thread from a pile of such threads, akin to separating one piece of spaghetti from a plateful;
  7. Thread the thread through the little hole in the envelope;
  8. Open the second button from the top of the shirt;
  9. Trim any extra thread from the opened buttonhole with miniature scissors;
  10. Pull the string through the buttonhole, tie a knot to secure the baby envelope, and re-button the button to secure the string.
  11. Breathe a sigh of relief and… repeat.

Note that several entries combine functions. I didn’t want to list fifteen or sixteen steps, but I could have.   Please forgive me, but I couldn’t help thinking that if there WERE a task appropriate for child labor to complete, this is it.

 

*****

 

In the interest of family comity and all-around “good guy” behavior, I completed my extra button task with sufficient efficiency to be offered another task. Thus, confirmation of the axiom: “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Job number two involved separating groups of buttons into plastic sandwich bags in groups of ten. These would be used for the eventual manufacture of future shirts. Again, I had to separate the now-familiar piles of stunningly similar-looking buttons and count to ten, like a pharmacist counts pills. Unlike a pharmacist, however, my efforts would not be “life and death.” Or so I thought…

After I’d completed ten bags, Kelly chose to double-check my counting. How this happened, I don’t know, but the first two bags she checked had twelve and eight buttons, respectively. This calamity represented the low-point of my career as a no-wage worker.

“If the seamstress gets a shirt order with the wrong number of buttons attached,” said Kelly, distraught, “the whole process stops.”

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I pictured myself with Lucy and Ethel stuffing my face with chocolates as the assembly line sped up. Though the rest of the bags contained the correct number of buttons my fate was sealed. “You’re fired from this task,” she said.

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I shook my head with sincere regret and embarrassment, but at the same time, my mind drifted towards retirement from clothing manufacturing. I pictured the delicious Italian dinner that approached in just a few hours like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Kelly interrupted my reverie, however: “I have something you can’t possibly screw up.”

“Oh, good,” I said, sincerity draining away.

“You’re tall, and these shirts have to be put up away,” she said, indicating several piles of shirts and several empty cubbyholes high up in a wall unit behind a table.

“I can do that,” I said, with enthusiasm. I recalled the task my father often assigned me in his clothing store, fifty years earlier, to break down empty boxes. What satisfaction can be gleaned from a simple-minded activity that cannot easily be messed up!

I distributed the shirts by size to their appropriate spots and chastened from the button experience, double-checked my own work. After fifteen minutes, all of the shirts were put away and Kelly finally called it quits for the day.

“You’ve shown yourself semi-competent with buttons,” she said. “The next time you visit, maybe we’ll try you out on collar stays.”

Oy.

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CLOTHING CONNECTION

Gifted at soccer, trained as an educator and filled with sociable energy, my oldest child has chosen to become a fashion designer. It’s ironic on a number of levels not least of which is that Kelly was not exactly, shall we say, rigorous in her fashion choices as a youngster. During her teenage years, in fact, she wore the same corduroy jacket, jeans and wool cap for weeks on end. By high school, whenever she needed to dress nicely, she relied upon her nine-year-old sister for guidance.

Now just over thirty, with her wife, Laura, Kelly is consumed with the establishment of their firm, “Kirrin Finch,” which will offer clothing to women with tomboyish tastes. Together, they are selecting fabrics, buttons and cuts with meticulous care. No detail is too small for them to debate, in a constructive way, in a heartfelt drive to “get it right.”

What would Lou Sanders have thought about this?

*****

My father didn’t set out to spend a fifty-year career in the clothing business. When he finally arrived in Philadelphia from Kiev, via Cuba, he took the first job that was offered, behind the counter at a delicatessen. Immediately, he found the smell of fish on his hands to be repulsive and, after several months, quit to become a clothing salesman.  Shortly thereafter, in the late 1920’s, he rented a space to house his own shop. By the early 1940’s, he’d bought a neighboring building and moved his business, Lou Sanders’ Men’s Shop, into it. There it continued until 1981.

Unlike Kelly, my father didn’t aspire to the creative aspects of the business. He also had no interest in manufacturing. He was a salesman. I’m not even sure it would have mattered to him if his product were clothing or hardware or tires, so long as it wasn’t fish.

*****

Kelly also didn’t come to fashion as a foregone conclusion. As recently as a year ago, she and Laura considered opening a restaurant as their enterprise. Their consideration of businesses so unrelated to their professions raised eyebrows.

“Why not just keep teaching and pharmaceutical marketing?” someone asked Kelly and Laura, respectively.

“We want to do something together,” said Kelly.

“Fair enough,” concluded the Greek chorus. “But what makes you think you can just parachute into a business or career without any preparation?”

“You’ll see,” they said, to the skeptics.

And we have. On their honeymoon, Kelly and Laura clearly spent countless hours churning through the possibilities. They identified the lack of female-proportioned clothing available to tomboys as a need to be addressed; they concluded they were the perfect team to solve the problem. Not content merely to spend money and hire professionals, Kelly and Laura have set themselves on a vigorous course of education to become experts in the field.

Utilizing their existing skills in marketing (Laura) and networking (Kelly) they have created a business plan, social media buzz and gained acceptance to Pratt Institute’s prestigious incubator for new fashion entrepreneurs. a major accomplishment. To our alarm, Kelly even asked to borrow our sewing machine; that might be taking the “do-it-yourself” mentality a step too far.

“How do you turn it on?” she asked.

*****

My father loved his time at the Store. It was where he was most comfortable. But I don’t believe he cared about the product. He wasn’t solving a problem or addressing a need, except for his need to make a living. Not given to reflective communications, he never expressed anything about the subject of men’s clothing, even while devoting half a century to the cause. Sure, he preferred dressy clothing to denim. And he certainly wouldn’t have approved of ripped jeans under any circumstances. But these preferences could just as well have been expressed if he’d become an insurance agent or a lawyer.

He held many beliefs deep within a well of silence. We weren’t always sure about the inner workings of his mind. But the preferences he did feel sharply, such as that his sons marry within their faith, were communicated with an extreme clarity, spoken or not. When he first met my wife, Katie, who is not Jewish, he closed his eyes, leaned back his head against the couch and proceeded not to speak for the rest of the afternoon.

Several months later, when it appeared Katie and I might stay together, to my great relief, he refrained from an angry display. Certainly already chastened by my mother, he broached the subject of his disapproval with subtlety, even graciousness.

“She’s pretty. She’s smart,” he conceded, then continued, with his coup d’ grace: “But she’s a little older.” This from a man who had married a woman fifteen years younger and made known he felt that was a good idea.

He left out the major facts that she was also Unitarian, divorced and the mother of a two-year-old daughter.

“How will he be with Kelly?” Katie and I fretted.

“Will he accept her?” we wondered.

If he rejected her, Kelly would sense it, to say nothing of the resentment Katie would feel.   To say we were concerned with their introduction to each other is a vast understatement. Yet, when the time came, Lou Sanders instantly abandoned all his inhibitions about religion, about divorce, and about step-grandchildren, a relationship he would have scoffed at as tenuous, at best, in any other family.

He loved Kelly like his own grandchild immediately, indistinguishable from his other six. Katie, too, was accepted as a beloved daughter-in-law from the moment it became clear she would not be going away. Did Lou reach this accommodation easily? Probably not. But once he got there, Lou Sanders didn’t look back.

*****

Perhaps that is the closest connection he has to Kelly and Laura’s new enterprise. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. It’s just coincidence Kelly is entering the field of clothing where my father “played” for so long. In the important ways, when push comes to shove, Kelly is going about it the right way, all in. And as a grandfather to Kelly, when he could have fallen so much shorter, Lou went all the way. If Lou Sanders’ Men’s Shop existed today, doubtless he’d feature a new line on display the moment it becomes available: Kirrin Finch: menswear apparel for women.