The new director of retail has opened two stores inside the museum, is now selling the work of 90 local artists and revamped the web site to sell around the world.
BY Kathleen Nicholson Webber FOR THE INQUIRER
When celebrated architect Frank Gehry created the long-awaited CORE project addition to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he carved out two spaces for retail stores just outside the galleries he envisioned. His prominent design underscores the importance of retail to the museum. Each store was to be a thoughtful reflection of the galleries it flanks.
Filling those stores was the job of Christine Kostyrka, who had just been appointed director of retail in 2019, and her buying and merchandising team. They were tasked with designing and outfitting the two new stores and felt the weight of the responsibility of measuring up to the architect’s work. The Design store aimed to celebrate modern and contemporary design and feature global and local jewelry, home décor, and apparel, while the early-American gallery store had to embody a craft feel, featuring papercuts, pottery, rugs, glass and quilted textiles.
The result is two newly merchandised brick-and-mortar shops that opened in May 2021, featuring the work of more than 90 local artists, along with a revamped main store, and an overhauled website that has enjoyed a dramatic rise in sales and set a new paradigm for retail at the museum. The stores are bringing a new infusion of money at a time when the museum is grappling with the impact of the pandemic.
“A retail store at a museum should be better than a regular retail store; your expectations should be higher because you’re in a museum,” Kostyrka said. “It should be the idea of learning something new and finding something you’ve never seen before.”Advertisement
Kostyrka became just the third retail director there in 30 years. She was granted carte blanche to create a more elevated shopping experience. She approached these new shops like a start-up, employing the innovative, forward-thinking skills she sharpened during her 30-year retail career at top lifestyle brands such as Urban Outfitters.
“For whatever reason, I’ve joined companies just as they were transforming into something else,” Kostyrka said. “I would much rather work on that idea of building something from the ground up than walking into an established business.”
Revenue at museums comes from donors and endowments, memberships, and admissions, and often overlooked is the contribution of retail operations. According to the Museum Store Association, museums make from about 5% to 25% of annual cash flow from their stores. Some museums hire buying offices or retail experts such as Kostyrka and her team to handle purchasing in a more systematic fashion. In 2019, retail operation sales at the Philadelphia museum tallied $3.06 million and accounted for about 4.75% of total operating revenue and support, according to an audit of the institution’s finances.Advertisement
“Every museum has to decide whether or not they want to invest in retail,” said Alia Gray, sales director at Aesthetic Movement, a New York-based global buying office that sells to museum stores including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the New York and San Francisco Museums of Modern Art. “They have to understand it is an investment and it is something that draws eyes and ears and profit to museums in a way that can be done with integrity.”
Books are displayed in the main store at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum has three shops, the Main Store, the American Gallery Store and the Design Store.MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Kostyrka is well-suited for her role; as much at home in her duties focused on commerce as those that demand a trained eye for art. The native New Yorker spent her youth roaming the Metropolitan Museum of Art, studied painting at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and even taught art briefly. Feeling the pinch of the scarcity of jobs in the arts, Kostyrka changed directions and opened a home goods store on Long Island with no previous retail experience while in her 20s. That led to her three-decade run at such brands as Martha Stewart and Urban Outfitters, where she was the head of the $90 million home category.
At the Philadelphia museum, she would have to draw on all her experience. Not only was Kostyrka undertaking a crucial portion of what amounted to Gehry’s reinvigoration of the main museum building, built in 1928. But she also would have to do all that in the middle of a global economic meltdown.Advertisement
Soon after her arrival, the pandemic struck, shuttering the museum and drying up the foot traffic that its stores depended on. The revamped original store was open just six months when COVID-19 shut the museum down while the new stores were still under construction. Retail sales operations tumbled 40% in 2020 from the previous year to $1.8 million, according to the museum audit.
The Philly Moon Tarot T-Shirt by James Boyle at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Other U.S. museums took a similar hit. A 2021 study on COVID’s impact by the American Alliance of Museums found that three-quarters of museums reported, on average, a 40% drop in operating income in 2020. Museums were closed to the public an average of 28 weeks out of the year due to the health crisis, according to the study. The pandemic shuttered the Philadelphia Museum of Art for eight months in 2020. While 2021 sales figures are still being tallied, foot traffic is still not back to pre-pandemic levels, according to a museum spokesperson.
“After the pandemic, the stores were the last thing on everyone’s budget list,” Gray said of museums broadly.Advertisement
The pre-pandemic museum store formula was to rely on visitors and blockbuster shows to sell exhibit books and products. It could be profitable if you had blockbuster exhibits and hordes of visitors.
With the museum doors closed, Kostyrka and her team of three buyers, a merchandise manager, visual merchandiser, and operations manager pivoted to expanding the lackluster website, beefing up the selection from 300 products to 1,500 items and signing a contract for a new web platform.
The merchandising team had little experience with ecommerce but Kostyrka did. “We didn’t have a great product. There was no point of view and the photography wasn’t great,” Kostyrka said.
They worked with a graphic designer to create web pages that made it easier to shop and created product categories aimed at broadening the customer base. The site began drawing customers from all over the world. Web sales soared, increasing by 75% in 2020 from 2019, Kostyrka said, declining to share specific revenues.Advertisement
To create buzz about products, Kostyrka started Instagram and Facebook pages for the stores. “We have recently started experimenting with video via IG [Instagram] Reels and TikTok and the response has been great,” she said. “So much of what we sell has a story, and that story adds value so must be told visually and in an easily digestible, compelling way.”
Kostyrka said it was important that she be as careful in the curation of her offerings as the rest of the museum. Half of the shelves of the main store were previously stocked with books that sometimes sat for years, gathering dust. Now a carefully selected assortment of hard-to-find books from European and small, independent publishers makes up a quarter of inventory.
Buyer Choti Weiler discovered new publishers abroad, as well as local independent imprints such as Beehive Books in the city. Each store in the museum now has its own selection of culturally relevant books on such subjects as female designers and African American artists. Kostyrka worked with the museum’s education department to carry books from visiting authors. The result was that books have since become the retail operation’s top-selling category.
The art museum celebrates local artists
The pandemic stirred up more challenges than just diminished foot traffic. The museum wasn’t immune to the tangled supply chains that threatened other retail operations. Kostyrka increased her reliance on local artists and vendors, a move she had intended to make before the pandemic.
“Local has meant we have more opportunities for collaborations and custom designs,” she said. It also means a quick turnaround and fewer supply chain issues.
Local artists now account for 25% of the products in the total retail mix, Kostyrka estimated. She cites the example of Kristen Buck, an artist who makes pie plates, mugs and bowls with a mystical vibe.
Buck said Kostyrka discovered her work at a crafters market and invited her to the museum to talk about collaborating. “It is an amazing privilege to be in these stores, the ultimate compliment,” Buck said. The museum has sold dozens of her pieces and she said that allows her to support herself with her work.
“Many of the local Philly makers grew up going to this museum; it’s like their home,” Kostyrka said. “To be able to partner with them in that way and support them in that way has been a gift.”
The curators appreciated how the galleries and shops are tied together. “Christine and [merchandise manager] David Lincoln looked hard at the collection, talked to us about the installation plan, and made a big effort to find local artists making work that responded creatively to the objects in the galleries, from wood and glass and ceramics to textiles and painted objects,” said Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American Art. “It is also great to support our local artists, and brings a unique Philadelphia flavor to our visitors.”
Pencils on display in the main store at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Drawing with the Diana pencil
Kostyrka has products that cost less than $5 and some that are $5,000. A bestseller resulted through a partnership with Blackwing pencils, a highly collectible brand and popular with art students who sketch when visiting the galleries. Blackwing worked with Lincoln to create an all-gold Diana pencil, embossed with an arrow, in honor of the Diana sculpture in the Great Stair Hall at the museum. A box of 12 costs $35.
Since launching the product in late 2019, the museum has sold close to 3,000 units, mostly to collectors in Japan, Korea, Australia and the U.K.
Analytics have shown that half of online purchases are made using a phone, so Kostyrka plans to launch a test of text message marketing this spring. She and her staff began using Lucky Orange, a heat mapping tool in April 2020 that gives a glimpse of what customers are searching for on the website in real time and includes functions that allows museum staff to assist with purchases in real time.
Kostyrka spends a lot of time on that app, answering questions to better understand the online customer. “COVID has shown us the necessity, not only from a retail perspective, but just from a content perspective, of chatting and engaging with potential visitors when they can’t come through the doors,” she said. “[Digital] is not an area where I think a lot of museums have invested money, but I think a lot of that is changing.”
This spring, Kostyrka aims to stage a pop-up market, inviting local artisans to sell at the museum. Like any start-up, Kostyrka plans to be nimble and reexamine her needs and new opportunities. One idea is to look at licensing opportunities to use their imagery on such lifestyle products as fashion or home items. “It gives us better margin, and unique products you can’t find anywhere else, which helps us turn the page from the expected to surprise and delight.”
So far, the administration is encouraged. The retail operations team prioritized telling Philadelphia stories, appealing to diverse audiences, insisting on ethical and sustainable manufacturing and responsible packaging, said Leslie Anne Miller, chair of the museum’s board.
“One of our stores celebrates our new galleries for early American art, and each time I go through, I smile knowing that everything it offers opens a little window on history and the collection,” Miller said. “That the store achieves this with style, humor, sophistication, and a love of the museum speaks to all we’ve been trying to achieve in the retail experience.”Published Jan. 23, 2022
Former Olympic rower John Strotbeck dreams of employing thousands of people at his sports apparel factory in North Philadelphia. His firm is also opening five physical stores.
by Kathleen Nicholson Webber for the Inquirer Dec 27, 2021
Workers sew garments at the Boathouse Sports plant floor on Hunting Park Avenue in Philadelphia. Boathouse is trying to reinvent itself with new products.JOSE F. MORENO / Staff Photographer
John Strotbeck estimates he’s outfitted millions of athletes through Philadelphia-based Boathouse Sports, selling a million units of outerwear and athletic gear to professional, college, and high school athletes annually for the last 20 years.
Now he is betting that some of those athletes, now in their 30s to 50s, will buy Boathouse apparel for nostalgia reasons, reminding them of the “best years of their lives.”
The pandemic torpedoed Boathouse’s business in 2020, as it did to many others. Between the state restrictions placed on nonessential businesses and the halt to team sports for longer than expected, Boathouse could no longer rely on its typical customers.
And while business has now almost entirely recovered, Strotbeck saw big changes in consumer behavior and preferences and felt the firm had to diversify its sales and marketing channels.
The plan: continue outfitting teams but pivot to more consumer channels. Strotbeck recognized he needed help building a consumer brand from the company he launched in 1985, between his appearances for the U.S. Olympic rowing team at the 1984 and 1988 Games.
“I was smart enough to know what I didn’t know,” Strotbeck said. So, 13 months ago, he hired a CEO, Cindy DiPietrantonio, former chief operating officer of Sidney Kimmel’s Jones Apparel Group who managed seven acquisitions for the $4.5 billion company and a multitude of labels like Stuart Weitzman, Nine West, and Jones New York. She also led jewelry brand Alex and Ani.
The ambitious 90-day plan that DiPietrantonio started with had to be tossed out when COVID-19 lingered. The firm’s labor force fell off drastically, Strotbeck was sidelined with the virus, and a malware attack had the new CEO scribbling financials on the back of a napkin.
Big changes are coming
It took some time to steady the ship, but now its e-commerce consumer business is ramping up, currently 10% of sales — representing a 34% rise over last year. The company has set a goal of 30% for online’s share of total sales for next year.
Cindy DiPietrantonio, CEO at Boathouse Sports, poses for a portrait at its headquarters in Philadelphia on Oct. 20, 2020.DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff Photographer
And it is investing in brick-and-mortar stores — this fall in Nantucket, Mass., and in the spring, five additional stores in other tony waterfront towns like Annapolis, Md.
“Our goal is to make it more accessible by selling in key retailers, Boathouse branded pop-ups as well as Boathouse.com and through collaborations,” DiPietrantonio said.
Nantucket was a natural because the firm has a strong customer base in Boston, a big rowing town. Boathouse sold to Nantucket’s TownPool, whose owner wore the product as a prep school and college athlete. And when inventory thinned there, it got a lift in sales on the website in the Boston area.
The CEO also beefed up her team and hired a director of e-commerce and marketing, directors of operations and finance, and merchandising and design associates. The firm uses an agency to help with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising while in-house employees handle other digital marketing and social media.
DiPietrantonio also spent lots of time listening to consumers and learning the brand’s DNA.
“Our consumers have an emotional attachment to what they wore in high school or prep school, so we’ve made a few tweaks to styles and we have branded it with Boathouse,” she said.
Top sellers
There’s a new version of Strotbeck’s first rowing jacket, the Gore-tex Stevenson jacket ($108-$264), a refashioned long swim parka that just hit the site ($198), and in 2022, the restyled retro Coaches Only jacket ($168).
Last spring the firm launched the Tailwind hoodie ($78-$88) and sold more than 1,000 units by repeatedly tweaking the product with new colors and patterns.
Founder John Strotbeck helped package an order of face masks for shipping at the Boathouse Sports factory in North Philadelphia on April 14, 2020. The company, which normally manufactures custom sports apparel, switched to making personal protective equipment during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic.Read moreTIM TAI / Staff Photographer
DiPietrantonio has worked with the design team to introduce new prints using a technology that Strotbeck invested in almost 15 years ago to compete with shoe brands called sublimation. It’s the process by which a digital image is fused to the performance fabric using a heat transfer process and expensive equipment.
The company added sublimation in 2007 to fend off the shoe brands like Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas that ate away at its college team business. It was a relatively unknown process but now accounts for 70% of uniforms. Strotbeck estimates he has invested $1 million in equipment alone to be able to customize apparel.
While the athletic apparel sector is wildly competitive, DiPietrantonio said there is room for more players. “Our competition is not the shoe brands and it’s not Lululemon, Athleta, or Outdoor Voices. I think there’s white space between those two categories for a quality, authentic outerwear and accessories brand. And that’s really where we fit.”
There are two groups the brand resonates with: the former athletes who wore Boathouse, and the 15- to 25-year-olds seeking an alternative to the large brands.
“They’re looking for companies that represent more than just making a buck,” said Strotbeck. “We make everything in the USA. That’s important to people. It should be. It’s more important now post-COVID than it was pre-, being a socially responsible company.”
DiPietrantonio said the firm pays at least $12 an hour for sewers — a rise from $10 pre-pandemic — along with health insurance and a 401(k). “We gave out [pay] increases in 2021 and will in 2022,” she said. “My goal is not to be competitive but to have some of the best wages in the industry.”
While many companies are dealing with far-off supply problems, Boathouse’s pain points have been closer to home: finding enough local factory workers and navigating the domestic trucker shortage.
Still, the firm has been lucky. “Where most companies are dealing with 14 to 19 weeks from order to customer delivery, we are dealing with five to seven,” DiPietrantonio said.
Pre-COVD Boathouse had 225 employees, 170 at the factory alone. After the pandemic drained the workforce, the firm now totals 170 and 80 at the factory.
“We are finding it very difficult to get people to come back or just hire new people,” Strotbeck said, despite the safety precautions in place.
The company is offering finder’s fees for new hires and training for new factory employees. Boathouse has had to find local factories to outsource work to fill orders or turn them down.
“This is a national issue; it might be an international issue,” he said.
Its current 100,000-square-foot facility was intentionally chosen where he could find apparel craftspeople. Boathouse was courted by officials in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Kentucky to move there in the late 1990s when the firm had outgrown its 20,000-square-foot Wissahickon Industrial Center facility.
“We made an educated guess that, while pay was lower in the South, it would be hard to find workers in a few years as the auto industry and data processing were investing heavily in the regions. We decided to stay in Philly.”
He took out a map and put pins on where all his employees lived. The company opened its Hunting Park Avenue facility in 2000, hoping eventually to quadruple the production capacity.
That hasn’t yet happened. But “I have this dream. I’d love to employ thousands of people in Philadelphia, and I think that is achievable.”
“I know product and she knows brands, consumers, and how to grow a business, particularly in the retail side,” said the founder, deferring to his new CEO. “ She’s definitely going to take us to very big places.”
Fabscrap hopes to sign up 20 to 25 brands to recycle textile waste in the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and southern New Jersey areas over the next year.
Camille Tagle, co-founder and creative director, and Jessica Schreiber, founder and CEO, posed for a portrait at the new Fabscrap location in the Bok Building in South Philadelphia, on November 15, 2021. Fabscrap is a textile reuse and recycling company.. … Read more
MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Fabscrap hopes to sign up 20 to 25 brands to recycle textile waste in the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and southern New Jersey areas over the next year.
by Kathleen Nicholson Webber, For The InquirerPublished Nov. 15, 2021
In fashion, the design room is the laboratory where each new season begins — and where the waste stream starts, too.
Designers, seamstresses, pattern-makers and cutters hover around the dress form, cutting, pinning and draping a style that can eventually end up on a clothing line.
But once that sampling process is done, all around that mannequin are piles of cutting waste, leftover sample yardage, swatches of various colors, and mutilated samples that are of no use to the design house. This waste is generated every season and the responsible disposal of it is an enormous problem for the industry, one that has a multitude of environmental repercussions.
Fabscrap, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit, is addressing it by opening a Mid-Atlantic hub in Philadelphia in the artist-and-designer-filled Bok building on Nov. 15, World Recycling Day.ADVERTISEMENT
Fabscrap hopes to sign up 20 to 25 brands for service in the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and South Jersey areas in the next year. Companies send the group more each year “because they are happy to find a responsible good outlet for all their design materials,” said Jessica Schreiber, Fabscrap’s CEO. “They start with fabric, but then we’ll receive buttons, leathers, yarn, ribbon, etc.”
Volunteers sort through textiles at the new Fabscrap location in the Bok Building in South Philadelphia on November 15, 2021. Fabscrap is a textile reuse and recycling company.MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Fabscrap’s fashion roots
In 2016, Fabscrap, opened in Brooklyn to work with fashion, interior design, and entertainment companies, collecting their unwanted fabrics to recycle and save from landfills. It has worked with 550 brands and, for a small fee, picks up an average of 6,000 pounds of textiles a week from customers. It sorts and decides what can be reused, recycled or sold. The group will soon reach its one millionth pound spared from a landfill.
This facility will work with local recycling company Retrievr, a residential textile collection company, to collect waste here. The former Bok school’s 6,800-square-foot cafeteria now will house 16 fabric-sorting stations, a fabric resale shop and an area to showcase the work of one designer a month who uses recycled materials in clothes.ADVERTISEMENT
Volunteers, totaling 7,000 so far in New York, are compensated with five pounds of free fabric per three-hour session and will sort the fabric by fiber for resale. Some smaller scraps are sold to companies that shred it for use as insulation or fabric stuffing.
Fabscrap received a working capital grant from Philly-based fashion company Urban Outfitters Inc. to secure the new facility and provide general operating funds for the first two years here.
Fabscrap first began working with Urban in 2019 as Allie Noll, the firm’s manager of global sustainability and sourcing operations, searched for a company to recycle its waste from the sampling process. In 2019, she was connected with Fabscrap and shipped 246 pounds of cutting waste to the New York facility. In 2020, Fabscrap recycled more than 1,100 pounds for the Philly-based company. That’s when the partnership talks began.ADVERTISEMENT
“It happened pretty mutually,“ said Fabscrap’s Schreiber. “We were looking to grow and needed support,” while Urban wanted to explore a deeper commitment to sustainability.
The Anthropologie store at 18th and Walnut in Center City is photographed on Wednesday, March 25, 2020. Urban is helping the Brooklyn-based Fabscrap grow in Philadelphia.HEATHER KHALIFA / Staff Photographer
“Urban suggested Philadelphia and we already had great connections with organizations, institutions, and programs in Philadelphia so it seemed like the right next step,” she said. To date, the company has signed on Urban and its brands; Wolhide, Lillies and Loaves, and Cupid Intimates and just finished service agreements with eight other companies in the area.
“We’re expecting about 3,000 to 5,000 pounds per month, and then growing after that as we meet more of the industry here, as well as companies in Baltimore, DC, and southern New Jersey,” she said.ADVERTISEMENT
Globally, 53 million tons of textiles are used to create clothing each year and about 12% of that is wasted during design and production, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which aims to create a circular economy that eliminates waste and pollution.
The scale of the problem in Philadelphia is harder to quantify. While the Office of Sustainability has figures for residential textile waste (linens, clothing and towels tossed by households), it has none for commercial waste because businesses contract with their own private haulers, which aren’t required to report those figures to the city.
Nordstrom helps assemble the data
“The main thing that we are hearing is that it’s precisely because commercial textile waste is not measured or tracked that Fabscrap services are so needed,” Schreiber said. At its offices, each bag collected is weighed, sorted by company and fiber, and kept in a database. Each company can see how much it has recycled in a year, a useful metric for sustainability reports.
Nordstrom has also partnered with Fabscrap with a grant to fund the Fabscrap Partner Portal, which allows every customer access to its diversion and environmental impact data, increasing supply chain visibility, and improving decisions throughout the supply chain.ADVERTISEMENT
Residential textile waste is 6% to 6.5% of the total waste stream here. To calculate those figures, the city does a waste characterization study by picking through samplings of trash over several months and weighing it by category.
Bins of fabric scraps for sale at the new Fabscrap location in the Bok Building in South Philadelphia on November 15, 2021. Fabscrap is a textile reuse and recycling company.MONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
Helena Rudoff, waste reduction lead in the city’s Office of Sustainability, estimates that residential and commercial textiles together could be 10% to 15% of the total waste stream.
“Right now, if you are a design house or another business and only being serviced by the Streets Department, your textiles aren’t being recycled.”
Philadelphia trash goes to landfills, such as the 250-acre Waste Management facility in Fairless Hills, Bucks County or to be burned at the Covanta facility in Chester. The Waste Management site, opened in 2016, is already close to 50% full and it is hard to know how long it will take to become filled.
“Their work not only conserves landfill space but also gives new value to the energy and raw materials that went into producing these textiles,” said Waste Management’s John Hambrose, referring to Fabscrap’s work.
The number of stakeholders interested in re-thinking waste here is growing each month. “The issue with waste is, we eventually run out of places to put it, ” said the city’s Rudoff. “Textiles are high-value waste, meaning the value of the material if you recycle it is higher than if it goes to a landfill.”
She works with such groups as Circular Philadelphia, which opened in June, and hopes eventually to work on the policy side of the problem. In New York, by law, if a fashion house generates more than 10% of its waste in textiles, it has to be recycled.
Samantha Wittchen, director of programs and operations at Circular Philadelphia, is working on a Textile Recycling Task force, along with Rachel Mednick of All Together Now PA.
Wittchen would like to attract a large-scale textile recycling facility to open in the Philadelphia region. Right now, the closest ones are in North Carolina. Better data can help them effect policy changes locally similar to what New York City has in place and would be even more powerful if statewide data could be captured.
“Are there opportunities at the state level to ban putting textiles in a landfill?” said Wittchen.
Kabira Stokes, CEO of Retrievr, said her broader vision for her group and for the city, is also to set up a full circular textile recycling plant somewhere in Pennsylvania. “It’s the only way we will be able to certify that the responsible outcomes are happening with what people are giving us.”
Volunteer Marsha Sickles, from West Philly, sorts through fabric scraps at the new Fabscrap location in the Bok Building in South Philadelphia, on November 15, 2021. Fabscrap is a textile reuse and recycling company. Sickles has volunteered at the Brooklyn location and is a designer who makes hats, bags and other accessories.. … Read moreMONICA HERNDON / Staff Photographer
For Schreiber and her co-founder and creative director, Camille Tagle, the mission for Fabscrap has always included education, especially at the university level.
For five years, Tagle has worked with Drexel University senior fashion design majors in a capstone project that has her selecting and donating fabric for them to create a design using zero waste design practices. “Those students have gone on and worked in the industry and they get their companies to work with Fabscrap or to focus on more sustainable practices,” Tagle said.
Open back, tie at the neck, tie at the waist, perforated (for easy tear off), slit cuff, thumb loop cuff, elastic cuff, disposable, reusable: Ed Gribbin can tell you that there is nothing simple about a medical gown.
His Merion Station office has three dozen medical gowns of every style, each serving a different purpose and each requiring a different performance textile, thread, expertise and equipment to make. Gribbin runs his own supply chain strategy consultancy in a field that skyrocketed to prominence with the coronavirus pandemic as hospitals and governments have competed for gowns, masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE) vital to safe testing and treatment.
And as the pandemic wears on, his industry is seeing demand not only for more products, but also for goods made in North, Central and South America.
Coronavirus Coverage
“Talking to hospitals, chief medical officers and purchasing chiefs at government agencies, there is a huge distrust of importing product from China,” Gribbin said.“Add that to the current trade tensions we have with China and the fact that at any given moment the administration could pull the plug and say the border is shut and we aren’t bringing anything in, everyone is a little skittish. We don’t want to be as reliant on China for production as we have in the past. The fact of the matter is we want to build a permanent supply chain here.”
In January, when few Americans had even heard of the coronavirus, Gribbin became president of the Americas Apparel Producers Network, with members across the globe encompassing the 30 links of the apparel supply chain “from the dirt to the shirt,” as he puts it.
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At the start of the pandemic, the group set up a site where suppliers could post their capacity to make critical PPE. Within 15 minutes of going live, it was flooded with posts from 1,000 companies offering capabilities, advice and tools, said Mike Todaro, managing director of AAPN.
“The postings were surprising. Fifty percent who had cut-and-sew capabilities were not in apparel. One was a parachute maker, and awning, tent and umbrella makers. They were people with ingenuity, reinventing their businesses to keep their lights on and help make PPE,” Gribbin said.
TIM TAI / Staff Photographer Ed Gribbin, who runs an apparel consultancy firm and is president of the Americas Apparel Producers Network, wears a washable face mask at his home in Merion Station. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Gribbin is now focused on coordinating the manufacturing of isolation gowns and face masks.
He had the Herculean task of categorizing those posts and building spreadsheets playing matchmaker to connect fabric mills with cut-and-sew operations to coordinate the production of critical medical supplies for hospital systems and FEMA. When Emory University asked Todaro for 90,000 gowns by June, he and Gribbin coordinated the effort. More than two dozen network members pitched in, among them Philadelphia’s Boathouse Sports.
Before March, more than 90 percent of gowns were made in and around China, which went into lockdown because of the virus. Supply chains were shut down, and hospitals had nowhere near the inventory that they needed.
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“The demand for gowns in medical and nonmedical applications on a month-to-month basis is running 10 times what it was a year ago in July because so many people are using them that never used them before,” Gribbin said.
Doctor’s offices, dental and ophthalmologist practices, police departments and rescue workers all need gowns, often for the first time. And hospitals need many more gowns than ever.
“We just learned that FEMA wants 263 million gowns in the next six months when their original estimate had been 110 million,” Gribbin said.
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Gribbin thinks he can work with three facilities in California, Cambodia and Colombia to start on that order with 20 million gowns.
But even as supply chains from China reopen, he said, it’s clear that demand for products made in North and South America is high.
Made in the Americas is preferred. “There is a huge distrust of importing product from China,” Gribbin said. “Add that to the current trade tensions we have with China and the fact that at any given moment the administration could pull the plug and say the border is shut.”
“Everyone is a little skittish. We don’t want to be as reliant on China for production as we have in the past,” he said. “We want to build a permanent supply chain here.”
Last month, the Trump administration made a change that could boost that effort. It moved gown purchasing from FEMA to the Defense Logistics Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense and gives preference to certain domestic products under what is known as the Berry Amendment.
“There is a lot of talk in Congress now, with bipartisan support, for extending the Berry Amendment to include critical medical supplies so they would have to be sourced in the U.S.,” Gribbin said. “It will not affect hospital systems, but it would affect the federal government and the way they buy and possibly state governments in buying PPE.”
As it is, the Department of Defense realized the United States does not have the capacity to produce 263 million gowns domestically, Gribbin said. Because of that, it broke the procurement into three tranches: anyone who could submit an American solution will get considered first, anyone from a country where the U.S. has a trade agreement is next, and then comes anywhere else such as China.
But there’s much more to Gribbin’s task even than sourcing an enormous number of gowns. He must also get the right kind of gowns, ranging from those that are simply resistant to liquid, all the way to gowns with a laminate polyethylene coating impervious to even viral matter. The highest-grade gowns have to be FDA approved.
Then there are disposable vs. reusable gowns. When Gribbin worked in the uniform industry in the 1980s and ’90s, the majority of gowns were reusable, and hospitals had laundry services. Then disposable gowns became popular for their convenience and cost — about $1 to make. But they get used once and go to a landfill along with medical waste. “Hospitals are now starting to ask for washable gowns, which will last longer and are better for the environment,” he said.
Demand for gowns shows no sign of slacking off, given enhanced safety protocols and uncertainty over the virus.
“We think there will be long-term work with state agencies, health-care systems who will all want domestic product. I believe 20% to 30% of medical product will be made in the USA or in this hemisphere. Just last week, the Air Force was on one group call requesting white papers from any interested party on what a government investment might look like in expanding domestic capacity to make more critical health-care supplies with the government as a financial partner with industry to make that happen.”
Some AAPN members are getting back to what they made before they switched to PPE and others are surfing the discussion board, still looking for opportunities in this tumultuous time. Gribbin takes pride in the network’s response. “The level of generosity, the sharing of information and resources, even with competitors, just made me feel really good about being in the industry.”
Zoey Hudson, center, assistant director and instructor at Made Institute in Old City, gives a demonstration during a recent Introduction to Sewing class. The school will move to the Spring Arts District in August. Photo by Thom Carroll/Philly Voice
Class is in session at Rachel Ford’s Made Institute in Old City.
The first cohort of aspiring designers in the 15-course Designer Development Program is sketching, draping and sewing, and this summer they will have new, bigger digs in the Spring Arts District as one of the centerpiece businesses in a new maker community masterminded by developer Craig Grossman.
Grossman, who worked for the late visionary developer Tony Goldman (SoHo, South Beach), is best known for revamping South 13th Street into the current Midtown Village and sees this section of town as a center for the creative class where art, culture and technology will co-exist. His father worked in the New York garment industry and when he met Ford last summer, they clicked.
Before launching Made Institute, founder and owner Rachel Ford designed for Urban Outfitters and was a cutter/draper for the Philadelphia Opera. “This is a new approach to fashion and design schooling,“ she says. ”We want to help designers launch small fashion companies of their own.“
Ford, a designer and educator, has a vision, too: a new fashion ecosystem in a city that was once a hub for clothing and textile design and manufacturing.
In August, she will move Made Institute into a 3,400-square-foot space at 448 N. 10th St. The 7-story, 50,000-square-foot building formerly housed the Haverford Cycle Company, one of the last industrial buildings in the area. The Spring Arts District spans from 8th to 12th streets, from Noble to Spring Garden streets.
Grossman’s Arts and Crafts Holdings has also signed leases with two tech firms, Azavea and Boco Digital, and the Roy-Pitz brew pub.
“This pocket seemed like an overlooked area with a great history where some of the original makers of Philadelphia worked,” he said.
‘SO MUCH ROOM TO GROW HERE’
Made’s space will not only hold classes for aspiring fashion designers but also feature a membership-based “Fashion Co-Working Space,” fully equipped with industrial machinery, cutting tables, dress forms and resources for the growing fashion community in the city. This past August, Ford received a license from the Pennsylvania Department of Education for the program. She has already received more than 50 application requests for the spring session.
She and her staff will train students to become professional sewers, tailors, fashion designers and design entrepreneurs.
“This is a new approach to fashion and design schooling. We want to help designers launch small fashion companies of their own,” Ford explained. “We focus our curriculum on the entrepreneurial experience, while still presenting the fashion landscape as a whole. A focus on sustainability, resourcefulness, and embracing the latest technical methods are what really set us apart from other school experiences.”
Before launching Made, Ford designed for Urban Outfitters and was a cutter/draper for the Philadelphia Opera. Her instructors have master’s degrees or work as fashion designers, she said. Her students come to her with other degree backgrounds, looking to switch careers or save money getting training. The Designer Development Diploma in Fashion Design, which focuses on teaching start-up designers what they need to know to enter the marketplace, can be completed in one year. The full cost of the diploma is $7,845.
“When I was introduced to Rachel and visited Made Studio, I saw the Wolf forms and the machines and it brought me back to visiting my dad in Midtown Manhattan.” – Craig Grossman, Spring Arts District developer
The second prong to the Institute is the launch of their Fashion CoWorking Space, which allows members to use their state-of-the-art machinery, tables and start-up know-how to produce small collections. It will be open late night and offer three levels of membership (4 visits monthly, $75; 12 visits monthly, $150; 25 visits monthly, $300) as well as locker storage, access to machinery and 10 percent off classes. Ford received a $10,000 grant from The Merchants Fund to purchase 12 new industrial sewing machines for the making of both knit and woven garments.
“Designers that need a home base can avoid the costs of equipment capital and space, and use our studio whenever they need to,” Ford said. “In order to bring some manufacturing back to Philadelphia, there needs to be an investment made by private businesses like us into the design community at large. Our fashion co-working space is created to be a hub, open to the public at a low cost to promote and facilitate Philadelphia design businesses.
“I hope that the space serves to inspire other aspects of the industry, like textile factories, fashion tech resources, and manufacturers will start to pop up and grow to inspire Philly’s designers to stay in Philadelphia and imagine their design goals,” she continued. “Textiles, fashion tech and manufacturing have so much room to grow here in Philadelphia.”
STITCHING A PATH TO SUCCESS
It was just four years ago Ford opened her doors in Old City teaching skills to the start-up designer, dressmaker, or home sewer with hands on instruction. She expanded to courses in patternmaking, textiles, tailoring and design studio. She will now add product development to the list of services they offer.
“I am now in a position to create a full circle ecosystem, where designers and makers are treated as equals, working together toward the common goal of making beautiful garments for their customers,” she said.
Ford said the program will have two starts a year. While the curriculum she wrote is heavy on technical sewing, a designer who doesn’t care for sewing can come to the fashion gym and pull from their batch of sewers to complete a small collection.
“Small-batch manufacturing and direct-to-consumer selling is a trend in the industry for smaller designers,” she noted.
Her long-term vision addresses the challenges of domestic clothing manufacturing. For many emerging designers, getting into a factory means reaching certain piece minimums that are just too risky for start-up businesses. The challenge for factories is finding sewers to man machines.
The trade of sewing and patternmaking has been harder and harder to sustain in this country, according to Ford.
“With fast fashion driving price points and constant deliveries, American consumers have a false sense of what a garment should cost,” she explained. “This creates a false bottom line for what designers can spend on manufacturing and in turn, what manufacturers can pay their workers. By educating designers and their customers about how a slower, more sustainable fashion landscape can keep sewing jobs domestic, more and more people will seek out sewing as a viable living. Independent designers could hire their own small team of sewers, and manage production themselves.”
Grossman has high hopes for Ford’s enterprise.
“When I was introduced to Rachel and visited Made Studio, I saw the Wolf forms and the machines and it brought me back to visiting my dad in Midtown Manhattan,” said Grossman of his father, who worked in the childrenswear business his whole life.
“I have been intrigued by makers my whole life,” he said. “What Rachel is doing speaks to me. She is a true maker and feel she can attract other makers to this area.”
Tuscan native Simone Cipriani likes to call Africa “the new Italy.” While Tuscany traditionally has been a place where many fashion brands had their headquarters and artisans were at their core, Cipriani feels that “with mass production, the value of fashion was lost.”
This story first appeared in the May 20, 2015 issue of WWD. See More.
In an interview before a recent talk at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Cipriani said he wants to bring that artisanal value back to fashion. As the head and founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a flagship program of the International Trade Centre, which is a Geneva-based agency of the United Nations and World Trade Organization, he and his staff link top fashion talents to more than 7,000 marginalized artisans, the majority of them women, in East and West Africa, Haiti and the West Bank to produce luxury accessories, shoes and textiles.
Stella McCartney underscores the value in fair wages and the empowerment of women in making products through the Ethical Fashion Initiative. McCartney and the EFI began their partnership in 2011 in Kenya, where the designer produces handmade accessories with local artisans specializing in screen-printing and tailoring. She makes canvas bags there, like the Noemi tote.
Ilaria Venturini Fendi of Fendi started working with EFI in the development of her Carmina Campus brand of accessories. She manufactures mainly in EFI’s Nairobi hub. Vivienne Westwood, Stella Jean, Mimco, Chan Luu, Sass & Bide, Karen Walker, Osklen and retailer United Arrows are among other designers who work with EFI. The group also develops and advocates young and emerging designers from these regions like Lisa Folawiyo, Sophie Zinga, Christie Brown and Studio One Eighty Nine, working on product development and connecting them with international buyers.
It was while Cipriani was working in Kenya in 2009 that the U.N. approached him with the idea for this initiative. He combed the markets for artisans making sure workers were paid a living wage, helping to lift them out of poverty.
“Fashion is a vehicle for capacity building,” he said.
In Kenya, where the initiative began producing in 2009, unit volume rose from 7,000 units that year to more than 170,000 units in 2014. From 2013 — when they started with fabric production — to 2014, volume more than tripled from 3,400 meters to 12,000 meters.
Production hubs are now in Kenya, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia and Haiti and they have begun working in Palestine, Cambodia and Peru. The organization has offices in Geneva and London and expects to open one soon in New York.
Cipriani sets up the network that trains and oversees the production until the microbusinesses can be handed over to the communities. Building structures takes time. So does wooing designers to join him in this movement.
“This is tough because they know this is a long-term project, not just a season,” he said. “The production times are longer. It is not fast fashion, but many see the benefit.”
Westwood, in her 10th season with EFI, is one who has, and she understands the high price of such artisanal wares comes with the territory. Christopher DePietro, her marketing and merchandising director, says a cheap product is of no interest to them — an embroidered canvas clutch retails for $99 while a duffel goes for $438. “The driving force is whether it is ethically made,” DePietro said.
Cipriani added, “When designers commit, we let them know the boundaries for the country,” like skill sets and materials available.
When ITC started working with half-Haitian, half-Italian designer Stella Jean in 2013, she began buying handwoven cotton fabric and natural-dyed bogolan in Africa for her men’s and women’s lines. These vibrant striped fabrics caught the eye of Giorgio Armani, who invited her to show her spring 2014 collection in his Teatro Armani in Milan.
“My collaboration with ITC Ethical Fashion Project started thanks to my mentor Simonetta Gianfelici [ITC project representative for Altaroma], who introduced me to Simone Cipriani,” Jean said. “The ITC team guided me and gave me the opportunity to go to Burkina Faso, Mali and Haiti. There, I found a rare treasure, looking at the busy hands of extraordinary women who tell, with dignity and hard work, a creative and cultural mosaic without any kind of mystification. Our work together is about a proper, accountable business, which is environmentally sound, promoting sustainable economic development and opportunities in countries that do not need our charity.”
Cipriani has other design houses on his wish list: one in particular is Hermès, because of its history of artisan products.
“Consumers want authenticity,” Cipriani said. “It’s a huge movement that can change the paradigm of fashion. When we talk to salespeople in stores, they say consumers like hearing the story behind the product.”
EFI has social impact studies on these businesses, which some of EFI’s designers use in their marketing. “Some say, ‘this is a good product on its own, without that distinction,’” said Cipriani, “but I say, let’s spread the message.”
Luxury retailer Hirofumi Kurino, founder and creative director of United Arrows in Japan and Taiwan, makes clothing and accessories in Africa including clutches and totes with beading done by Maasai women for their Tege United Arrows line.
“The more I come to know fashion, the more I am attracted to handmade materials that [reflect] craftsmen’s culture over mass-commercialized products,” Kurino said. “The EFI project enables manufacturing of handcrafted products while helping to improve life conditions of the producers. This is not only meaningful, but also enriches our heart.”
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