Auto-Ethnography: The Potentials for a Hyper-Local Manufacturing Process
I spent ten years working with a diverse set of skilled manufacturers and craftspeople in the garment district. As a fashion designer, I was able to take sketches or patterns to be cut and sewn into full garments. I could have custom buttons made in one shop and take them directly to the factory floor to be placed on samples. I was able to rapidly innovate without wasting much time or money. For example, if one of the manufacturers knew that a fabric I provided would not work for a specific style they would call me, and I could come to quickly make changes to the garment construction with the input of extremely knowledgeable makers. Often innovative construction techniques, finishes or shapes would emerge from the creativity in troubleshooting afforded by this proximity to the manufacturing process.
Unfortunately, in recent years there have been efforts to move these small-business craftspeople and manufacturers away from the central midtown hub and disperse them across New York’s five boroughs. This will negatively impact the designers, suppliers, manufacturers, and many other businesses in the area. As property prices continue to rise and these businesses can no longer afford to stay, it comes as not only a loss of economic support through employment and exchange of goods and services within the manufacturing network, but also a loss for production and manufacturing innovation.
In my experience with off-shore manufacturing of clothing and handbags, shipping costs can get out of control, and samples very rarely come back on-spec (accurate to the technical measurements or pattern). Other problematic scenarios arise from the off-shore model, like intellectual property theft, trademark infringement, loss of technical making knowledge, and a lack of transparency regarding ethical labor and fair wages.
This is not the case for all off-shore manufactured products - however, clothing, furniture, and homewares are at a higher risk for some, or all, of the risk areas (listed above).
As an auto-ethnographic case, I base this on multiple conversations with other designers as compared to my personal experience in the fashion and home goods development industry.
To synthesize this experience, I co-created two diagrams to illustrate the difference between the design-to-manufacture process as an off-shore vs. a local production event. These diagrams are based on conversations with other small-scale makers. The first diagram (above) depicts this iterative and cyclical process as chaotic and risky, especially for small-scale designers and manufacturers. While off-shored manufacturing is often associated with lower production costs, it can be costly in other ways that are not often discussed.
In an ideal state, moving from phase to phase is manageable, iterative, and allows for rapid changes resulting in creativity and innovation. From defining the design, through prototyping, evaluation, and production, product managers and designers in close partnership with the manufacturers can work interdisciplinarily to achieve highly creative, well-designed, and well-constructed goods. Makerspaces and hyper-local manufacturing hubs or networks can fortify this design-to-manufacture nexus, while sustaining economic opportunity, and technical expertise within the community.