Visiting Lisa Sun’s factory on West 39th Street feels like going back to the 1960s. It’s a wide open space with mostly women sitting at sewing machines in the front. In the back, workers operate big ironing boards that press layers of fabric together like a panini sandwich. The steam comes from a boiler through pipes draped from above.
“You need a certificate for a boiler because of the heat that comes from pressing,” said Sun, while showing how this machinery pre-shrinks a woolen jacket to the perfect size. Old-fashioned equipment is all over the factory. A black Singer sewing machine is used for uniforms because they have thicker fabric.
Sun is CEO of an online apparel company she founded in 2013 called Gravitas. In January, she bought this factory by partnering with Michael Lee. His company, Superb Stitch, sews her garments.
Buying a factory at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic might seem like a crazy bet. The city’s apparel manufacturing sector has been hemorrhaging jobs for more than half a century. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of people worked in the industry. Those jobs dried up as manufacturing moved south and then overseas for cheap labor.
But Sun, 41, describes her investment as a survival strategy and a declaration of hope for a sector of NYC’s economy that has long struggled to bounce back.
“I've got at least another 20 or 30 years in the fashion industry and I'd like for it to be here in New York City,” she said.
A Partnership
Sun is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in California and spent more than a decade analyzing the fashion industry for McKinsey & Company.
Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant himself, founded Superb Stitch in 1990. He’s worked with famous designers, like Anna Sui, and had hundreds of sewers on his payroll in the beginning. By the time the pandemic struck, he said he only had about 20. Then, everything came to a halt.
Michael Lee, of Superb Stitch, with men’s suits and uniforms
“Last year is very, very tough,” he said. “I’m doing over 30 years and never met like this. It was horrible.”
To keep Lee’s workers busy, Sun’s company designed facemasks and donated them to hospitals. The publicity led to contracts to make more masks and gowns, and a collaboration when they bought the factory.
“Ultimately I said, why are we in separate locations when we work together so much?” Sun explained. “Why don't we share expenses? Why don't we join forces?”
Sun calls Lee a “mentor.” They knocked on doors and found a factory owner who was ready to retire, and bought her equipment. They said they now pay $6,000 a month for 2,100 square feet, which they describe as a cost savings. They also lease out space to a small company that makes uniforms for doormen, police, and firefighters.
Mike Cardillo of M&G uniforms (left) rents space from factory owners Michael Lee and Lisa Sun
But Sun wasn’t just looking to share expenses. Her Gravitas label specializes in making inclusive fashion for women of all sizes, with half its styles produced in China and the rest in New York. She sees potential in this factory and the branding of Made in New York for two main reasons.
“One is, we’re fast,” she explained.
Sun said her orders that go to China can take four months before they’re completed and shipped to the U.S. She uses Chinese factories for mass-produced, cheaper items like leggings. In New York, she can have something ready to wear in two weeks.
“And so I can chase demand, I can chase trends,” she said.
But it’s much more expensive to make clothes here. She said workers at her 39th Street factory earn $15-$22 per hour—three times as much as they make in China. This is Sun’s second strategy. She’s now educating customers with a new line of items that explains who’s making them.
This year, her designer, Aruk Ochirvaani, made a black tote bag with layers of fabric that symbolize the interconnected segments of the garment district.
“This bag saved our business in January because no one's buying workwear during a pandemic,” she said. Her website features a collection of totes and says five bags equals a full day of work for a seamstress. She said the message helped.
“When you make transparent to a consumer what that garment or that bag means to someone who lives in America, there is an emotional attachment to the product that is different than. ‘I bought it on sale’ and it was made overseas by a faceless worker.”
Lisa Sun with Gravitas designer Aruk Ochirvaani
The Limits of Made in New York
Sun is hardly the first person to try to capitalize on the phrase Made in New York. It’s been around for decades. Barbara Blair, president of the Garment District Alliance, said it’s never carried much cache.
“I might pay more for something made in Italy, speaking as a consumer, or made in France,” she explained, of the average American buyer’s mentality. “But I don't necessarily pay more for something that's made in the United States.”
And Americans aren’t buying as much fashion, in general. “There's a big decline because we're dressing differently,” she said, noting how casual Friday has now turned into working from home all week, following the rise of e-commerce and the collapse of brick-and-mortar retail. There were just under 10,000 apparel manufacturing jobs in early 2020, according to an analysis by the Center for an Urban Future. But another third were lost during the pandemic, with just 6,300 remaining as of March.
Yet, Blair does think there’s room for small, niche companies like Gravitas to expand. But she said the garment industry needs to be more competitive. Its equipment is old and many businesses, like Superb Stitch, don’t even have websites.
A Singer sewing machine inside the factory
Meanwhile, factory jobs aren’t attractive to high school and college graduates. Few are unionized now and garment industry workers are mostly immigrants who can’t get higher paying jobs. “No young people join this trade to learn this work anymore,” said Josie Davila, who runs a cutting room in the same building as Gravitas.
The city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) has a program with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to provide grants. Adam Friedman, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, said the government can do more.
“So that might be around export assistance, or that might be around branding, or that might be around workforce development and lending for equipment for those companies that want to buy,” he explained.
He said zoning protections didn’t keep factories from being priced out of expensive space in the Garment District. Nor was the city able to entice anyone to buy a new building for manufacturing in the district—despite offering $20 million in capital funds.
An EDC spokesperson said it didn’t receive any viable proposals “despite extending the procurement deadline multiple times through February 2021.” The agency is now working with three separate building owners to preserve 240,000 square feet of fashion manufacturing space through incentives.
Sewers at the factory
Friedman said the $20 million offer clearly wasn’t enough. “The city needed to contribute more,” he said. “Plus they should have tried to assemble a pool of funding in collaboration with New York State and the federal government.
The federal government recently contracted with three city companies to make personal protective equipment, one of which has union workers. EDC said it purchased over 4.2 million locally-made medical gowns for distribution to healthcare workers in the city. But Friedman said the city should do more by stockpiling for future emergencies, as the federal government did. The state recently partnered with a few companies.
Now that the pandemic is easing, Sun and Lee’s factory is doing more business and most of the workers are back. Sun hopes to gradually expand. She’s looking into 3D scanning to make customized clothes, as they do in China. She said investors might be attracted if she lands on a popular item, or finds more partners.
“These are all part of the plans but right now, this year is just to prove that we can make this work,” she said.
Beth Fertig is a senior reporter covering the city’s recovery efforts at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig.
