We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Holli Gibson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Holli thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
Oh gosh – we actually do a lot different than industry standard. When we built Direct to Source we purposefully asked ourselves at every step of the way – can we / should we do this differently?
We kept the best things – stringent QC controls at every step of the process for example. But we threw a lot out.
This industry is very opaque. Some of that is convenience so that brands can claim “that wasn’t our fault, we didn’t know what was happening” and some of it comes from protection of knowledge – he who holds the connections can stay important. We’re very invested in transparency. We introduce our customers to our suppliers – we want them to know where their fabrics and trims are coming from. And yes, on occasion it has not worked out in our favor. But just because sometimes someone will take advantage, it doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.
We don’t operate as many factories operate either. Lots of the large factories only make a few kinds of products. Their sewers may be very good at their one operation but if the left sleeve sewer is out ill, the right sleeve sewer can’t fill in because they don’t know how to do that job. We have a very highly trained team. Many of them go from sewing knits to sewing wovens to screen printing to the sample room and then back to production. It’s a big investment for us, but it means that we are a highly flexible factory with extremely good quality. And you know what, should one of our employees move or ever want to work elsewhere, they can do that and command a good wage for their talents because they have more skills than most.
Check out the “What, Why and How” section of our website for more details!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Holli Gibson is an apparel industry veteran with more than 30 years experience in various industry and customer segments. She is a former Head Designer for Russell Newman. In her tenure there, she designed and developed apparel collections, including fabrics for Nordstrom, Dillard’s and JC Penney among other major retailers. Her team produced more than $25million of apparel annually, in countries ranging from Guatemala to Egypt to Turkey to China and Indonesia. After relocating to Colorado, Holli became involved in the design and production of apparel domestically and abroad with an eco-conscious focus. In 2009, she was awarded the Rising Star from FGI for her efforts and in 2010 was awarded one of Westward’s “Most Influential People” in the Fashion Industry. She also co-founded the Denver Design Incubator, a non-profit organization to support and advance the needle trades industry in Colorado. Today she serves as the Executive Vice-Chair. In 2018, she and her partners, Tulio Hernandez and Ana Zavala founded Direct To Source, a full package apparel factory focused on helping brands produce Better, more sustainable apparel and to produce it ethically.
When we set out to build DTS, we set out to build a Better manufacturing facility. Better for our customers, Better for our employees, to make Better apparel, that’s Better for the environment. We took everything we knew from 30+ years working in and with factories, and looked at everything with a new lens – to analyze from the ground up what worked, and what didn’t work so well – and to look at every item in the chain and ask the question “How can we do this Better?”
We started with our core philosophies – treating people with value and honor, taking responsibility in our role as stewards of the planet. Then we filtered everything through this lens.
As someone who is passionate about helping brands grow and my work as Co-Founder and Vice Chairman at the Denver Design Incubator, and from sharing war stories from my own experience and with other brands, I really understand how difficult it can be to work with factories. All of a sudden, they don’t respond to voice and email….they can tend to be inflexible….you’re on a learning curve by yourself, they cannot or will not consult with you to make sure you’re getting the best product/price/order size/construction best practices/best fabric for your designs and your price point. I’ve been on the brand side, and I’ve owned my own brand, so I’ve been in your shoes. I want to help you make the best decisions possible for your brand and help your brand grow. I love to help our customers tackle new challenges and provide options from a manufacturing perspective so they can make the best possible decisions from a point of knowledge (not guesswork) for their companies. This is why it was important to have offices in the US – easy to reach, easy to talk to, easy to do business with.
As someone who has spent the past 15 years working on sustainability in apparel, it was important to bake this into our company as well. It wasn’t much a point of conversation 15 years ago in the industry at large, today that has really changed. And it’s much easier to build sustainability into your brand today because of better access to knowledge and better access to more sustainable fabrics. But it still can be really difficult for brands wanting to become more sustainable – either due to lack of knowledge, time, resources, etc. We’ve done the homework, and participate in the conferences. We’ve got the experience and have built the supply chains. We’ve built the partnerships and created the systems. We’re here to educate (not preach) and help brands who are interested in making Better, more sustainable apparel do just that. And to make it easy for them.
Our industry has an opacity problem. There is a lot that is hidden and many brands really don’t understand their supply chain. Also, many consumers still believe that you shove fabric into the end of some big machine and out pops your clothing on the other end. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everything we make – everything we wear is truly sewn by a real person. The “peek behind the veil” into this industry has begun. If we can continue that process, improve transparency, then I truly believe that is a good thing. If consumers really understood what it cost in human terms to make a $2 or a $5 tee shirt, most of them wouldn’t buy it.
As my partner Tulio said, “We’re impacting people’s lives. I want to do this as long as God lets us do it.”
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Turnover for sewers is extremely high. Part of this is the way a lot of factories design their business – the sewers only have work when the factory has work. Most factories take whatever orders they can get their hands on then simply subcontract the extra work out to other factories. Not only does this create quality issues for brands, but how can any factory sewer plan for their life or family when they don’t know if or where they will be working from week to week?
When we look at sustainability holistically, the work has to create a sustainable income for the people doing the sewing. We really just started from the perspective or creating a place we would like to work. Starting with the basics – everyone in our factory is a full time, permanent employee. And we don’t subcontract work to other factories because we can’t control they way they treat their workers.
We want our employees to feel special, to feel honored. We’ve built a beautiful facility, with lots of light, cool breezes, and we have the necessary safety equipment (along with safety training) to make sure we have a healthy and safe environment. The standard work week in Central America is 6 days per week. We only work 5. We work 44 hours per week and we do not work overtime. It’s important to have sufficient time to nurture your family or pursue personal interests. And we built in a town outside the city, so many of our employees can walk to work – many of them go home to have lunch with family.
We do a lot of training. Of our own employees and we’ve even opened up training for other people in the town. There are lots of sewing jobs in Guatemala now, and if we can help folks improve their skills so that they can improve their wages and their lives (even if they aren’t working for us) then we’ve been a positive influence on our community.
Most sewers don’t really know what happens to the clothing they sew. It’s all for some big brand somewhere. But we love to have our customers come visit and meet our employees. Customers are always sending us pictures from their marketing campaigns or thank you notes – and our employees love hearing the customer’s feedback and seeing their work in its best light. They feel really invested in our customers, because our customers are invested in them.
I guess at the end of the day we’re just treating people with honor, as we should be. And our team repays that tenfold in loyalty and hard work. We have less than 1% turnover. We’re like a family.
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met one of my partners, Tulio, about 20 years ago. I was a head designer in Dallas for Russell Newman, Tulio was our country manager for Guatemala and we made lots of plaid flannel sleepwear there. Even though apparel is an international business you’d be surprised how small the network can feel. We just sort of hit it off, similar ideals, and our paths crossed several times over the next decade.
About 10 years ago we both ended up being brokers and consultants – not really sure why but when you’ve been in the industry a long time people start calling and asking for help and all of a sudden you’re in business. I had gotten interested in sustainability – if we can make better choices, shouldn’t we? We were helping a few brands improve their sustainability and helping them with production. It was just one too many times that we placed production in a WRAP certified factory and then when you show up for a surprise inspection discover that it’s been subcontracted out to a factory that isn’t even legal (yes, you can probably imagine what that might look like, and it’s not good).
We finally decided that the only way to solve that was to build our own factory and hire our own employees. We had a nice chat with a couple of our key customers and asked if they would be our “guinea pig customers”. They said yes and we were off to the races!
It was Tulio that first insisted that we look at sustainability holistically. He and his wife Ana (also from industry) were key in setting up training programs and making our factory such a great place to work. Tragically we lost Tulio to Covid a year ago. Ana and I, and our entire team, are committed to continuing his legacy to leave a positive mark on people.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.DirecToSource.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holli-gibson-9899069/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkgIAVL46m0mlgCY2I9Sbxw