How the CEO and founder of Sunset Park’s Manufacture New York aims to accomplish nothing less than restoring the once-failing heart of city apparel making

by matt Scanlon

To spend even a few hours in the company of Bob Bland is to be whacked about the head and shoulders with something revolutionary in the jaded, cynical circles I often travel in: unapologetic and determined optimism.

The 32-year-old career fashion designer and business owner–who founded the city-celebratory label Brooklyn Royalty in 2006–aims to now do nothing less than reinvent the way clothing is produced in Brooklyn specifically, the city more broadly, and in urban centers widely. After looking back at a 30-year process in which better than nine-tenths of the Garment District-based manufacturing had been transferred to Asian production operations, she realized that one part of the price of $25 dresses was a middle-class job economy the city depended upon, and was wounded without. There had to be away, she thought, to harness what Bland termed the “too crazy to give up” spirit of American ingenuity to competitively integrate talent, supply chain, and manufacturing in one building, and under one supervising structure.

Ultimately, that idea came to be Manufacture New York, which began in 2012 with a $60,000 Kickstarter fund, evolved into a 14-month incubator in a 2000-square-foot Garment District space, then ultimately a deal with Salmar Properties to build out part of a city-block long former Department of the Navy building (now Liberty View Industrial Plaza) in Sunset Park—a two-floor, 320,000-square-foot expanse so large that a small plane could land inside it.

There, Bland and her team aim to house a hive of complementary skills— fabric and textile makers and suppliers, designers, pattern makers, and trim item makers (zippers, buttons, snaps, etc), to full-item production and shipping.

Arguably as critical as those traditional skill sets are others firmly planted in the 21st century, so the 12-year Brooklynite has made a media department and a wearable tech research and development unit part of Manufacture New York’s mission, components that helped boost city interest in the project to the tune of $3.5 million in funding from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).

We spoke with Bland in her Sunset Park office.

Matt Scanlon for Industry: Why does the city need this? If market forces are determining that the cheapest area of clothing production is in Asia, isn’t an attempt to reverse that trend a bit like fighting the weather?
Bob Bland: It better not be, because there is far too much on the line to simply accept that American fashion manufacturing is a gone thing. The post-NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1994) world we were all promised was one in which the inevitable manufacturing job losses were going to be offset by an explosion of white-collar employees—that somehow we’d spring into a service, tech, and executive society— and of course that’s not really what happened. Instead, gains we’ve seen in employment have been mostly in service and retail that pay 20% to 30% less than the manufacturing jobs lost, are more likely to be seasonal or on-call, less likely to include benefits, and as a result worker satisfaction is proportionally reduced. What you see with manufacturing jobs is that they’re simply better jobs, and those are the ones I wanted to bring back to the city.

Industry: How? How can city-made fashion duke it out with a $5 tee shirt?
BB: Well, first, you have to believe that evolution is possible. I grew up in Virginia right outside of Washington DC in a town called Fairfax. Great child- hood…solidly middle-class—my parents are both schoolteachers—and I grew up with an extreme sense of public service and social responsibility. I also grew up around lot of military and politically- minded people who believed they could change things. So faith is first, then I realized that the development system for American fashion making just wasn’t getting invested in—that for a new designer who wanted to make clothes here, it was so hard to set up a supply chain, hard to meet people, hard to get the business deals done or even know how to negotiate them. Every step was too hard to do alone.

Industry: So gathering many skills under one roof was a start of the solution?
BB: Absolutely. I was lucky enough to get into a series of jobs young—I worked at Tommy Hilfiger and Banana Republic, as well as Triple Five Soul as both graphic designer and fashion designer, and for Triple Five got a chance to go overseas to see production. I discovered that I didn’t want to be a part of that sort of system, and that we could manufacture again back home with the right integration.

Industry: What players have to be integrated in order for manufacturing to work?
BB: First is sourcing—bringing together all the raw materials you’re going to need, then making the textiles—whether they’re natural textiles, which is an agricultural product, synthetic, or an animal product like leather. Then there’s trim— zippers, buttons, snaps—all of that. Then you need the development process, the pattern making, the muslins, and the fitting.
Pattern makers are the engineers of fashion, and they are essential. From there comes sample-making—producing one-off examples that you sell to buyers. Once you’ve collected orders, you go into the production process, then do all the finishing, which includes tags, bagging or hangering, then shipping. We want all of that under one roof, plus designers, of course, which is where the process actually begins.

Industry: And doing that will get you to competitive pricing?
BB: Prices will be reduced as a result, yes, but we also have to market the American-made idea better. In fashion, New York City is iconic for its make— its tailoring and dress-making. There’s a reason why Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan started and made their lines here, after all.

Industry: How many tenants do you envision?
BB: I’m thinking we could accommodate 150 designers, then 28 to 30 manufacturers on each floor, depending on their size needs. We are just beginning to market the space this month, and have a bunch of applications already. A critical component of Manufacture New York is to offer those in the space reasonable rents, not just for a typical three-year lease period, but for 10…20 years. With that predictability, businesses can actually plan and invest.

Industry: Are you battling a Manhattan fashion mindset among designers and makers? Was Brooklyn a stretch for them?
BB: No, for the most part that thinking is going. It might have helped that the city just hasn’t defended zoning in the Garment District, so you’ve seen an explosion of hotels and co-ops there where design and manufacturing space used to be. And this building we’re in is just an exceptional draw. When I met Marvin Schein, he and his business partner had created a company together called Salmar Properties specifically to purchase this building. He has an incredible vision, not just for Liberty View Industrial Plaza, but for the Sunset Park corridor as an industrial hub. The company recently finished a $100 million renovation…took a derelict structure that had been largely abandoned for 20 years and made it a worldclass industrial space. The entire building is embedded with Fios, so everyone who’s getting wireless in this building is getting it through fiber optics. It’s also outfitted with clean air exchange, which means that HVAC is already in the building…no ductwork hanging from the ceiling. There’s also an on-site general contracting crew that can really do any sort of build you could want. The building itself is on the historical registry, and is LEED Silver certified. There’s 24-hour security around the perimeter and in the interior, plus cameras, and new passenger elevators as well as 16 freight elevators and shipping facilities. What else… three lobbies…one of which will have a huge atrium. They really have spared no expense to make this not just a place for us to reside in, but somewhere we can be proud to work.

Industry: The city investment of $3.5 million is intended to pay for what?
BB: It will fund the subdivision of the floor for manufacturers, so they don’t have to pay for that build-out. That was a major win, and we were the first startup to get a grant of that magnitude. Manufacturers who are considering locating here can also take advantage of a city program called
REAP (The Relocation and Employment Assistance Program). It will offer a company $3,000 per employee per year for 12 years if it moves into targeted industrial zones like this. If you have 25 employees, that’s $75,000. For the first five years, it’s reimbursable, so if you don’t owe taxes, then you actually get a check. After that, it’s just tax incentives. Still, we all pay taxes…so the deal is pretty incredible.

Industry: Why is a wearable tech incubator such a critical part of the plan?
BB: When I started, I knew that wearable tech was somewhat of a joke; it’s initial foray was really gadget-based…a bunch of stuff on your wrist. I thought Google Glass, for example, was not comfortable and I don’t think it looks good. The trouble is that not a lot of tech companies are engaging with real fashion designers on a developmental level. The real future is in fiber science…embedding the tech into materials you would already wear. What we feel is that it only makes sense to have a wearable tech R&D lab here, along with a biochemistry lab, a wet processes lab, and a 3-D additive manufacturing component. The result, we hope is that the process will be more user-friendly, more accessible, and operate better—to a point where we are actually having technologists collaborate with manufacturers and designers, where everyone is equal.

Industry: If you had to put the plan together all over again, what would you do differently?
BB: Oh…be born rich I guess [laughs]. No, I don’t really think I’d change much, and I do think the possibilities are stunning. It’s absolutely possible to bring this industry back to the city—to make it a place of creativity and job diversity and vitality. In fact, doing that is inevitable if we expect to resuscitate the middle class here.

Manufacture New York
Liberty View Industrial Plaza / 850 3rd Ave. / 212.500.1303 / manufactureny.org