I was thinking about this this morning and another aspect occured to me. When I'm designing our products, I pattern them myself from scratch -- either on rolls of newsprint or graph paper that I scale to the fabric. Then I make the prototypes myself and we test the prototypes. When our OEM production facility in Missouri gets a new product, they get all of my patterns and the prototype. The only real differences between my prototypes and final production are due to the fact that I don't have a bartacker or edge binder like the factory does.
One of the main reasons we're not in the garment business is that I don't have the chops to pattern something to go around the human body. I could certainly work with a clothing designer to get the cut and features that we think are important in a garment, but they'd be doing the hard work of taking an idea and making it work in the real world.
How that ties in with Kuiu is that I started wondering if Kuiu's founder is patterning his own clothing or working with clothing designers to translate his vision into reality. I know that the guys in Vancouver have that facility because Arcteryx mentioned it to us when they recommended that shop to use for production of our garment like product. Then I started wondering if the Vancouver shop had done design work for Kuiu as a loss leader on the way to building what they expected to be a long and mutually profitable relationship, only to see that design get awarded to another factory.
To be clear, this is all completely uninformed musing -- but it does go to show just how complex and interdependent the relationship between a design and sell shop and their manufacturing partner can be. I am truly thankful for our manufacturing partner every time I think of them, and I hope they appreciate the business we've given them since literally before their company was up and running.
