Making of the HYFN Mask: Fabric Shopping
Deciding to manufacture a product in the middle of the pandemic turned out to be a nightmare.
The biggest hurdle was sourcing the fabric. Because of supply chain delays and disruptions, the fabric we had sampled for our prototype became unavailable, causing a massive delay in production. This was a problem because we had already started selling the mask on our site and people were anxious to receive orders. Our manufacturer told us that it could be months before they were able to complete our order.
So you have to make a decision: wait and just have orders go out late or to figure out a solution that would minimized this delay. Obviously we chose the later and our only options was to find fabric in NYC and ship it to our manufacturer.
We made a trip to New York's garment district and started going door to door looking for the perfect fabric.
This ended up being a lot more difficult than we had thought. The right fabric not only needed to look good but also needed to feel good against your face. Several times we found fabric that we liked but they did not have enough yardage to cut the amount of masks we were making or it was too expensive and drove the mask cost up significantly.
But after 2 days of searching and hitting up several stores we finally found the perfect fabric and were able to ship it out the same day.
It was a pain the the ass but we enjoyed every minute of it because we were learning something that was completely foreign to us. It gave use visibility into a new space and how to operate within it. This is exactly what HYFN is about for us: personal growth and ventures into the unknown.
The Garment District is full of amazing fabric shops. Here are two great NYC fabric super stores to check out:
B & J Fabrics
Fashion Center Building
525 7th Ave
New York, NY 10018
Mood Fabrics
225 W 37th St
3rd floor
New York, NY 10018
