Resonance Companies on Wednesday announced a key milestone in driving the return of domestic textile manufacturing–the opening of the company’s first U.S. sew-production facility in New York City.
The 300-square-foot facility is housed at Pier 59 in Chelsea Piers, adjacent to Resonance’s headquarters. Resonance, which operates a factory in the Dominican Republic, has built what it calls the first “creation-to-customer-closet” platform for sustainable fashion in which the company uses digital printing on organic and environmentally certified fabrics as part of a fully automated process to design, sell and make garments in real time, on demand, sustainably anywhere in the world.
The new facility is comprised of 12 sewing stations with the ability to make hundreds of garments per week supported by Resonance’s proprietary technology. The team plans to hire additional team members to run the NYC facility, as well as several others that are planned in the coming months.
“The U.S. has lost 1 million apparel manufacturing jobs in the last 50 years,” Resonance chairman and co-founder Lawrence Lenihan said. “These jobs won’t come back by just wishing it. Every step in the value chain to create fashion needs to be reimagined. Using advanced machine learning, innovative manufacturing systems and new human processes, we can create thousands of living wage jobs across this country.”
Resonance is committed to bringing components of garment manufacturing back to NYC, where a thriving textile manufacturing industry was driven overseas in search of lower production costs. The company is also working to create a network of U.S.-based sew production firms utilizing the Resonance platform to renew stateside manufacturing across the country.
Related Stories
Resonance believes that this network can birth a new fashion value chain and new entrepreneurs can build job-creating manufacturing businesses in their communities powered by orders for clothing from brands on the Resonance platform. These next-generation manufacturers will compete on cost and by being closer to the end customer, adding value to the last-mile process, and producing garments that create social and environmental value transparently, the company said.
Resonance’s goal is to open hundreds of these sew production facilities around the country and internationally, while also connecting existing ones, helping to reimagine the textile manufacturing experience for designers, consumers and the world.
Resonance says it is charting the fashion industry’s future through its proprietary technology platform, create.ONE. This technology has created the ability for a brand to design, sell and make one product on demand, sustainably, anywhere in the world, as efficiently as 1,000 garments in the traditional, long-run legacy environment.
The company has also created ONE.code, an identifier that measures and verifies, via blockchain smart contracts, the amount of resources consumed at each step of the manufacturing process of an individual garment in real time. The scannable code, which is part of every garment produced, tracks everything from the fabric mill certification, to the chemicals and water used, to the wages and working conditions of the person who sewed each piece of clothing.
The company notes on its website that it only employs digital printing, which utilizes a fraction of the ink and water used in more traditional processes like batch-dyeing or screen printing. All materials are made of natural fibers and each is 95 percent biodegradable.
All materials are printed after a customer order is placed. There are no unused rolls of pre-printed or pre-dyed fabric. Resonance laser cuts all pieces, which reduces fabric waste per garment by 8 percent.
It also uses Bluesign-certified chemicals in all processes, from pre-treatment to finishing.