Overcoming Challenges

October 20, 2021

As many of you know, our manufacturing is located in Jaipur, India.  In the last eighteen months, we have faced a series of manufacturing challenges.  These challenges have impacted our production schedule, our worker’s health, their families, their children’s education, their mental health and our supply chain for almost all raw materials —cotton fabric, zips, buttons, labels, colors for printing, packing materials—yes, nearly everything, But these challenges have helped us learn not only to be more resilient generally, but have also helped us to become more efficient with time and resources, to be more organised, more focused, more compassionate.  

We experienced another extended period of covid related lockdowns in April and May and the resulting series of supply chain issues.  While we are nearly caught up from those events, we have also been working around increasingly irregular monsoon seasons and climate change in Jaipur.  The monsoon rains have a serious impact on our ability to block print—a core element of all our work.  Our artisan printing unit, like most all units in the Jaipur area, is an open air unit, subject to the weather.  Rain means we have trouble drying newly printed fabric on the bamboo scaffolding traditionally used for drying fabric.  High humidity means the color, after being stamped onto the fabric during block printing, dries more slowly which negatively affects the quality and look of the print and makes controlling clarity and finishing very tricky.  

While we try to plan far in advance to avoid these inherent issues with printing in the monsoon, the earlier lockdowns put us behind schedule and meant we have needed to print in the rainy season.  This often costs us fabric, in terms of prints that don’t meet quality standards and cannot be used in manufacturing orders; this fabric is ‘wasted’ unless we can creatively repurpose it in the form of overdyeing to mask poor quality printing, or in the form of up cycled accessories in which the print flaws show less due to the particular style or unusual use of the fabric.  In these ways we overcome the challenges and reduce the loss of fabric, but are still faced with time loss and additional projects in the process of repurposing.  

We inch our way through difficult circumstances, focusing on what we can do, work with customers to adjust as much as possible and explain the scope of the situation so that together, we can find workable options when circumstances are challenging.

Together, with our staff of stitchers, printers, pattern master, quality checkers, we have been able to improve our communication and teamwork to help reduce delays caused by the lockdowns.  We have been able to improve our planning and scheduling to avoid any gaps in our schedule.  

We also try to work closely with customers to update them on the challenges and circumstances of production, to find best fit options for both parties and to give them a head's up in terms of both ideal and tricky times of year to print.

We feel strongly that being a fair trade manufacturer has made all the difference in our ability to weather the last 18 months of pandemic related challenges.  We work primarily with customers who are also focused on upholding fair trade labor standards and working with us to find solutions rather than cancelling orders when challenges arise.  In many instances, customers have sent advances to help us mitigate the lockdowns.  Our adherence to fair trade standards have also helped us form stronger relationships with our suppliers and everyone in our supply chain so that we can all adjust and work toward a common goal. Fair trade practises have also helped us with planning and maintaining better internal communication, tighter production flow and ability to support our workers.

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