These 4 hands make everything we sell.

 NO SWEAT!

 Let it begin with me.

The terms "sweatshop" and "sweating" were first used in the 19th century to describe a subcontracting system where the middlemen earned their profit from the margin between the amount they received from a contract and the amount they paid workers. This margin was "sweated" from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked.

This concept of sweating is still in use today. The garment industry is a pyramid where big-name retailers and brand-name manufacturers contract with sewing shops, who in turn hire garment workers to make the finished product. Retailers and manufacturers at the top of the pyramid dictate how much workers earn in wages by controlling the contract price given to the contractor. Contractors are forced to "sweat" a profit from garment workers by working them long hours at low wages. The $100 sale price of a garment typically is divided as follows: $50 to the retailer, $35 to the manufacturer, $10 to the contractor and $5 to the garment worker.  

In the U.S. garment workers typically work 60 hours a week, often without minimum wage or overtime pay. The U.S. Dept. of Labor estimates that more than half of the 22,000 sewing shops in the U.S. violate safety and health laws. Many workers continue to work with blocked fire exits, unsanitary bathrooms and poor ventilation. The garment industry of today will search the world for cheap labor, will divide the job and send different parts to different countries in an effort to keep the profit in their court. To the right is a very brief list of some labor rates in different countries. You can see how dramatically the wages can vary.

 

We hope you will continue to look for ways to break the cycle of worker oppression. You might want to learn to sew yourself or continue to try to spend your money at worker controlled businesses.

We are very concerned about the exploitation of underpaid labor to produce the clothing we wear.  We have made it our goal to provide the consumer with goods of high quality at a fair price for both worker and consumer.  Clearly the inroads our small company can make are minimal, but we believe in the concept of “let it begin with me.” We design, cut, dye and sew everything you see on this web site in our studio. Each item you purchase is individually made, one at a time with the four hands we have between us.

We often hear comments that lead us to believe many people think that machines make clothes. This is far from the truth. Despite advances in automation the process of constructing clothes is exceedingly labor intensive. The pants you might buy from the chain store were sewn by women in much the same way your mother or grandmother would have sewn them. The exceptions have more to do with assembly line sewing than machine automation.