The new official TOJ thread, 2011 - Page 828

lots (well, a few) of S/S outerwear pieces on my mind. I am in the process of making some different fabrics happen, but I don't really want to start discussion on that stuff yet. It's not near ready to talk about, because you know as well as I do at this point.

We don't run a zipper shop as if we were baking up macaron flavors here, dudes. The anodized blacks give way to rainbow-y nickel, fwiw.

BTW we don't get to choose the colors for the base zipper teeth either - still gunmetal (we have this for black, or all colors - the former is black taped from the factory, the latter comes in white tape and we dye the fabric taping to match, which is the reason for the surcharge on colored jackets - it costs $50 to get an industrial small-batch dye job done) or black YKK Japans. Because there are 5 specific, unique pieces that we need for our 'look' - main 2-way #10 (could be #8 if a different brand, like Riri or Lampo) #5 closed tape with a small pull for the pockets, and then #10 (or #8) closed tape with a large pull for the cuffs - it's very specific since they have to match, and no zipper shop we go to has all of the required parts at once, or in quantity. The sizes are flexible only by reducing the large zipper gauge (#5 pocket zipper-sized gauge is kind of small proportionally once you get into the larger sizes, like 50 or above) and then all of these parts and pulls must be the same finish. They offer many finishes so finding a store that has all of these in stock at once is nearly impossible. Imagine trying to have those in 2 finishes, let alone 3 (and we actually use 3 separate colors of the same spec sets). It'd take a warehouse to be able to stock anything resembling a selection of zips that are to be used in clothing production, whereas in reality most of the zipper shops we deal with are like 6 x 10 industrial market suites. Many don't even specialize in metal or YKK zips, so we don't even go to them. There are only a few that do.

The zippers are still the same story, if we want to change that we have to order a bunch and wait a month or more, maybe 3 months. It's a real headache and not really possible. After import tax in Korea, shipping (you do realize how heavy a bag of metal zippers are right? imagine several bags) and a large broker commission, a 25-piece bag of YKK's we order from Japan is about $250 to us, so a single zipper is $10 and that's what we pay. If we made a real order for something else, like Riri, it'd cost about the same, but we'd have to order a lot. Not only for their requirements, but since putting together a medley of zippers like that takes the month or more to come in, we'd need a large supply of them to keep going. I figure it could cost up to $5000 to even really get started with Riris, just for the leather jackets. We can order single bags of YKK's, but there are no dealers on the ground for Riri - there is a designated Riri dealer for Korea but Armando is in Italy or Switzerland and Riri s.P.A expects everyone to do business with carbon copies, fax machines, and telephones, as if it were still 1989.

Anyway, same old story, yada yada. I'd like to switch up the zippers and try something new, just really not a possible at the current time though. Maybe I could do a kickstarter thing for getting a bulk of the zippers in, and contributors can get a nice discount voucher or something, like a means of pre-ordering.