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To Whom It May Concern,

Does anybody know of a company that can weave my pattern into their fabric? I'm assuming I need to contact a textile mill / manufacturer, but I have NO IDEA where to get started. I've called 20+ companies, and NOBODY seems to know what I'm talking about. I know I'm ignorant to this sort of thing...but I'm hoping SOMEONE can at least point me in the right direction.
If it's not too much trouble, I ask that you send me a Personal Message in response, as these forum chains can sometimes be difficult to follow.

Thanks In Advance,

Elijah J. Tobin

tobinelijah, you will not be able to receive private messages as you have a contest running. If you check the forums whenever you log in, though, you'll probably have some answers fairly quickly.
I personally cant answer your question though, I'm sorry about that.

Gotcha. Thanks, Illumina. I think that's a silly rule, of course. But I appreciate your heads-up just the same!

This looks like an global adventure in product development.

Looking at the patterns on your ranked designs, the best process for your application is most likely electronic Jacquard textile manufacturing made on equipment made by Bonas. It's a computer controlled Jacquard loom, just like you might remember from history class. There are also printed, plain dyed, yarn dyed , embroidered, and a couple other techniques that might work.

Mainland China, Indonesia and possibly Turkey are the big production regions for this sort of work. You will need to order the fabrics from them, then contract another company to produce the end products. Your fabric vendor might be able to help with this. One thing to keep in mind though is these looms can be very time sensitive to setup, from weeks to months, and are typically set to one type of fabric and kept that way through the entire machine life. You will need a vendor with multi-capabilities.

Cotton, polyester, nylons are all possible, but so are all the more exotic fabrics like carbon or Kevlar cloths...

http://www.alibaba.com/ Start at this site under textiles and see what comes up. In the past, see below, I've always used this site to find capabilities, then searched for the company's main website for more information.

My experience with this sort of project has been in circuit board manufacturing and the firms I contracted in mainland China were very nice to work with in some ways... very difficult in others. The biggest difficulty I found was in communication. None of the literally hundreds of companies I approached had anyone on staff who could understand English. Some could speak a little, but not enough to handle the technical elements of the work we were doing. I eventually had to hire a international student at a local University to help translate emails and conference calls. And while that helped, we still ran into problems do to all their variations in dialects.... meaning dialects and industry specific technical speak are not compatible. It was quite funny at times.

Good luck on this project. It's a lot of research work but is easily doable with a little persistence.

NeverSummer,

Wow! Thank you SO MUCH for all of the exponentially valuable information! I've searched high and low for ANY information regarding this matter, and you have been, hands down, the most helpful.
That said, there aren't ANY American clothing companies with the same capabilities?? I understand cheap labor, but I wouldn't mind a dent in my bottom line to keep jobs here in the U.S.
Thanks again for the valuable information, and good luck with YOUR business!

Regards

Elijah J Tobin

I understand your motivation behind sourcing American made fabrics and I'm sure you might be able to find them here, maybe electronic loomed cotton. Raw materials tend to be processed close to the source of production and since most fabrics are made from or contain synthetics today and those synthetics are manufactured overseas, most of the processing capacities are there. While we do grow cotton here and ship it overseas for processing, it's only because the machinery and demand for those cotton raw materials are there.

I know fabrics are still produced in the American SE, but under quantities and contracts that I doubt you could ever break into. Think factory farming and Walmart. I think you're looking for a more specialized type of small scale manufacturer and most of those are in mainland china. I think the dent in your bottom line you mentioned is quite a bit larger than you realize.

You could always get your source materials from Asia and contract a small boutique apparel manufacturer here in the states for the design and production. That's another huge chuck of your manufacturing cost though and you would probably end up paying triple or more for just the cutting and sewing portion of the process.

The tagline to aim for today has moved from "made in America" to "designed in America". Sometimes you get lucky and you can add "assembled in America". Take a look at some product packaging from American owned high end products, like Apple.

Hope this helps.

There is a company in Canada that does all over print on t-shirts. These are stain dyed. Not sure that will work for you.

Also I work with a banner company that does large format full color graphics on poly type fabric. You might try that option. OR find a company that manufactures the shirts for bicycle teams - they print the fabric first and THEN sew the garment.

Good luck.