Hi everyone I am Heather Lou of Closet Core Patterns and the sustainable online fabric
store Core Fabrics, which I own with my business partner and best friend Tereska and we're
really excited to talk to Seamwork today about the fabric supply chain. So we opened uh Core
Fabrics a little over a year ago I think. Yeah August 2021. And we really did it with a strong
mission. We wanted to bring beautiful fabrics to the sewing community and I don't want to say we were naive
but we have certainly... big learning curves. A lot of learning and so the supply chain is really
interesting to us and we thought we would kind of explain a little bit more about it because
you might not necessarily think about where the fabric that's coming from when you're sewing at
your table and there's a lot to kind of unpack so we're just going to kind of try to explain what
a supply chain is what the fabric supply chain looks like and what that means for you as a psoas
so what's the first step so uh fabric supply chain is really just every step along the way
from raw Goods raw materials all the way through until you get your fabric on your sewing table
or it's going into a finished garment that you would find in the store exactly and so the first
step in that supply chain is obviously the raw material and so for us we prioritize a lot of
natural materials so that would be a cotton plant that makes cotton flax that makes linen kind of
when we can find it silk from silk worms wool from sheep if it's synthetic it would be well
then we can have a polyester so that would be made from you know fossil fuel derivatives or
nylon but we would tend to prioritize things like synthetics made from cellulose so cupro
which would be made from cotton linter which is just like the um leftovers from the cotton
making or from the cotton plant uh or trees which would go into viscose bam bamboo there's
lots of basically viscose and Ray on those kind of natural synthetic fibers they're man-made but
the raw material is cellulose based so regardless that's the kind of first step is where that raw
material comes from and so when we're looking at a supply chain we want to know where that raw
material comes from and unfortunately because Supply chains are very long we're the furthest
away from that step and that is for us the most challenging thing to find out for example China
has a real problem using forced labor for cotton production in regions of China and so when we're
producing when we're selling something that's made of cotton we're trying to do our best to find out
okay was it produced in one of those regions it was polyester we want to make sure we want to
make sure it's not a virgin polyester and that we would all always want to recycle polyester to not
be bringing more of that product to the world because it doesn't break down it would you know
your lifespan last forever if we're going to look at viscose was the wood used from an FSC certified
Forest that kind of thing so but like we said it can be one of the most challenging things to
source and then once you get that raw material then the second step would be transforming that
raw material into yarn so in the case of say cotton or wool you're spinning it or actually
in any case you're taking the fiber that's been produced and spinning it into a yarn so most of
the time we're moving from where the crop has been grown or where the raw material has been harvested
to a second location often in a different country where that raw material gets spun into Yarns and
then once we have the yarn then what happens well often now it's going to another place so now it's
going to a different facility where it's going to be woven in a Mill and so it depending on what
type of fabric it is that might be one of the last steps because it might get to the mill and
they might weave it and dye it there or they they might weave it and maybe it's undyed it's prepared
for dyed and then it gets sent to whatever another facility where it's now woven into fabric that is
printed on so you can tell like how quickly and easily just depending on the complexity of the
fabric the type of fiber you can really there's so many steps in that chain and it's really easy to
get quite divorced from the raw material and that raw good and for us as a company we're constantly
trying to know as much as we can about the entire supply chain because as we know fabric industry
is really centered around fast fashion which is making fabric as cheaply as quickly as possible
that's often happening in places in the world that don't have strong labor and environmental
regulations and so so in order to get five dollar a yard fabric somebody has to pay that extra cost
and and so often often uh you're paying for dumping harmful chemicals in to the environment
usually into waterways or um the labor like you were mentioned before is paying by not getting
it or we're in a factory that doesn't have any kind of environmental efficiency and they're
blowing you know there's all sorts of ways exactly and so we're always trying to find prioritizing
sustainably and ethically produced textiles and I think that costing is important because I think
sometimes Solas are used to going into their nameless insert big box fabric store and getting
fabric for these dirt low prices and there is a cost attached to that there are people that
suffered in that supply chain and for us it's a real priority to minimize that suffering whenever
so now we've got this yarn and it's gone to the mill where it's been woven and maybe
died and maybe printed and maybe finished so now we have these finished rolls of fabric
now what happens with them well I will say it's really important to understand that the
fabric industry is a fast fashion kind of cured for these big industrial scales these Mills are
generally if you want to buy anything from they want a 500 yard minimum per color per style right
not a thousand if not a thousand if not two thousand if not five thousand so with these
huge order volumes there are very few people who are dealing directly with the Mills the mill would
send fabric directly to a factory where clothing is being made and in that case a designer is
saying I want this specific color or these three specific colors in this exact way and produce 10
000 meters of it or that fabric is being purchased by a distributor and so the distributor is able
to meet these really high order volumes and then sell to several smaller designers or fabric stores
people like us so you might notice that you go to visit your local favorite fabric store either
in person or online and you might notice that there are a lot of shared Fabrics right people
are being lazy it's not that we're all carrying the same things because we want to it's because
I can't go to Cotton supplier and say I want uh 12 colors at 100 meters they're going to laugh at
me most of them they just they don't understand that scale the smaller scale they're like well
I'll give you 1200 meters at one cup one color and I'm like I literally basically have that for the
next 10 years I'd never sell it so Distributors go and take advantage of their buying power and
then what happens is a lot of fabric stores and smaller designers are purchasing from
those Distributors so you'll see maybe shared lines I often go into clothing stores here in
Montreal with Indie designers and I'm like I know where that fabric came from I know where
that one came from because we're all shopping from the same place the exception to this would
be Mills that do have smaller minimums yes and so and so this is a big part of my job
our the globe and find Mills that will fit kind of our criteria so our criteria is how much buying
power do we have as a new fabric store but then also do they have Fabrics that are certified as
responsible do they have good labor laws and are they offering a beautiful line of colors that you
would actually want to sew with and so it actually limits pretty drastically our options I mean
suppliers there's probably hundreds of thousands of Mills and a small fraction of them or Waco
Texas certified or are using natural or Global organically certified cotton um so we you know all
of a sudden we have all of these meals and then it goes down to about this much and then the ones
that are willing to deal with us with our small yardages goes down substantially so we are really
building those relationships but just in general it's hard for smaller fabric stores to be able
to even engage on that level because minimums are still pretty big so you might have noticed if you
care about sustainability and fabric that there are all these new Innovations like Technologies
like Fabrics made out of Banana Leaf are made out of mustard shells or mushrooms or uh and we
continue to try and Source these things but they are just not available to us like the minimums are
really up in the 5 000 meters per color yeah so it can be a bit frustrating we're hoping that's going
to shift and really part of our mission when we started the fabric store is that we like hopefully
we can start introducing these meals hey people like to sew did you know that like there's this
whole other audience and maybe we won't buy uh 1500 meters in one color but we'll buy 1500 of
15. then let's can we work together and so that's been something that we've been working a lot on
and of course the other huge Source in the supply chain for when it comes to fabric is dead stock
so dead stock is really common in the fabric industry and part of that is just because it's
easy to get right you have factories that have produced as much clothing as they can or whatever
they didn't get enough orders they have these leftovers but sitting in the factory sometimes it
just gets thrown in the garbage in it or burned um and then hopefully you have agents that are
going around and kind of collecting it and then redistributing it so we have a few uh wholesale
they're called jobbers that deal with selling this dead stock Fabric and a lot of fabric stores are
getting that fabric that way to paint a picture we actually walk into these gigantic warehouses
that are just floor to ceiling racks and racks and racks and racks of fabric and and the really good
dead stock suppliers know all of what they have and they can guide you or they don't and you're
like burning things with the lighter I'm trying to figure out what it is and so in terms of how so
a lot of stories like they said most fabric stores are sourcing from Distributors they're buying dead
stock from these jobs and then again unnamed insert big box fabric stores might have bigger
contracts with jobbers where they're buying entire containers full of fabrics item scene
um and so you'll go in and they kind of have whatever they have and obviously those stores
again have more buying power so maybe they carry some customer regular lines because they're able
to again deal with these big minimums because they have a wider range that's right that said uh the
rhymes with fabric.mom uh model they don't care uh where the fabric comes from what they want is to
make the most amount of profit selling the fabric right so if they get it for two they're going to
sell it for 15 and that's their bottom line but that's generally how kind of capitalism Works
uh I think what you're trying to get at is that it's harder to have transparency in the Fabrics
that you're buying from bigger box stores because they just have thousands and thousands of items
and so you have very little information about each individual item and that's something that
we're really trying to address for fabric Fabrics as well yeah it's to just basically the point of
all of this is that pull back the curtain and let you as much as we can as much information as we
can personally gather what where fabric comes from let you know what the supply chain gets so you can
feel good about it and more and more people are doing this it's becoming more and more important
as climate change becomes more of an issue and so we're really like proud of what we're doing
um but basically the supply chain is complicated our job is very hard we love what we do uh but
we want people to just think a little bit harder about where that Fabric's coming
from why it's so cheap and who paid so that you wouldn't have to okay so now that we've
explained how the supply chain Works what does that mean for you as a sewing consumer well if
you care about making your sewing practice more sustainable there's a number of things that you
can do and obviously the most important one even just to start you're doing great already one
of the biggest problems is hyper consumerism and people being encouraged by the seasons of fashion
fashion so just by the virtue of making your own clothes you're already making a really really
big difference there's this big step in that supply chain that we're missing by sewing which
is factories and production and you know that you're not running a a sweatshop unless maybe you
are a one-person Sweatshop you've eliminated that possibly very uh destructive step from the supply
chain so that's wonderful I would also say another great tip if you're trying to reduce is just use
what you have I think so as I have a massive stash cabinet and even though we sell fabric we want you
to buy fabric uh we also want you to use what you have so from yourself so from your sash I
think that's a huge huge one educating yourself about certifications there are ways to have a bit
more transparency in the fabric that you purchase so ways that you can trust that where the fabric
came from are certifications like uh you know organic cotton so gots which is the global organic
textile standard uh wack attacks step and 100 um BCI cotton which is the better cotton initiative
there's a variety of and more kind of coming up all the time something like tinsel if you ever
see something like pencils TM it's a trademark um that's made by a company called lensing and
so they have all sorts of trademark Fabrics that are incredibly eco-friendly so just learning what
those certifications mean um can go a long way towards saying it's just as a good shorthand to
say oh I can trust this uh I would say in addition to that if you can't have a certification if it's
a little vague even just knowing where the fabric was produced and I don't necessarily believe that
everything made over overseas is bad I think that's a kind of frankly a racist connotation I
think there's lots of incredible fabric being made in really sustainable ways and all over the world
that said with the absence of a certification knowing something that was produced maybe in
France or the United States or Japan where they have really strong labor and environmental laws
that can be a kind of cheaty kind of shorthand way to know okay well I know reasonably certainly
that they weren't dumping all these chemicals in a river and people weren't being paid uh you
know 25 cents an hour to produce this so that's kind of another shorthand if you don't have this
certification knowledge a really great way to make sure that your fabric is sustainable
is using natural fibers whenever you can whenever possible so uh cotton linen hemp
rolls again even even viscose is depending on how they were produced actually those natural
Parts yeah so you're skipping a lot of the sets you're skipping a lot of the chemicals uh and
that is and and then also an added bonus is those natural fibers your garment lasts longer because
they're more durable over time and they can be composted so if it's linen you obviously
look into the uh standards of your community if you have a residential composting program
but you can maybe throw that cotton t-shirt in the compost that poly thread might not be
compostable so I don't know maybe you want to cut those parts out but it can be composted other big
thing I would recommend and this is something that we even encourage our customers to do as a
sustainable fabric store is to ask where did this come from and I think we only start to see change
I can say this as a business owner for two companies now that when we make changes because
people are asking for yeah so if you hold us accountable absolutely and so don't be shy in
a kind way obviously to say hey I'm interested in this textile do you know where it came from
and maybe that's going to spark some conversation with that fabric store and they're going to start
being a little bit more mindful as well and I think change starts on that really small granular
levels just asking questions and pushing us to all kind of do better and finally if you can't for
example throw your cotton t-shirt in your compost bin one thing you can do is depending on where you
live there are textile recycling facilities so we live in Montreal this is a fashion Cafe of Canada
we do not have an industrial textile recycling program here there are very few of various streams
it's really terrible but what h m um for all of its flaws is hoping to use I think by 2030 they
want their entire supply chain to be produced from textiles and so they have a really strong
textile recycling program so you can bring a bag of anything scraps old garments anything that you
want you bring that to h m and they will collect it and store it and sort it and reuse it so if
in the office of anything else if you're close to an h m you can go and recycle your textile
otherwise you might want to look into seeing if there's textile recycling programs in your
city but ultimately it's just as much as we can just trying to reduce the impact so that we can
leave the world hopefully better than we found it that's our bullet for fabrics and I'm hoping that
that's your goal as a human being I think that kind of wraps up our long-winded discussion of
the supply chain I hope that you know explained a little bit about where your fabric comes from
what it means for you is a psoas and hopefully you'll be inspired to think about it a little
bit more deeply the next time you go to sew your room for your own clothes all right thanks bye