All of Navas products are manufactured here in Vancouver except for our board shorts and cap. It was always our plan to make stuff close to home and we have no plans to move production offshore. Once we find a cost effective way to produce shorts here, we’ll do that too. In the mean time, let’s wait for men’s short shorts to run their course.
When was the last time you bought a garment made in North America, much less right here in Vancouver? Exactly.
For us there were a few things we had to consider before we decided to manufacture locally.
- Overseas means high volume. As a growing company we can produce limited runs of different products, sizes, and colours. Imagine if we made 5000 of one item that nobody liked. It would likely all end up in Haiti, and us bankrupt. Producing locally enables us to adapt to our customer’s needs with a wider selection.
- Shipping international samples back and forth costs time, and money, and lots of excess cardboard boxes. Designing it all here, and sampling it all here, cuts our carbon footprint down to a baby toe - If that. Plus we mentioned it’s cost effective right?
- A finished product usually sits in one of those shipping containers for around 30 days before it would arrive in the port of Vancouver. Then another week for people to find the container, unload it, pay the duty, open it up and make sure it’s the right container.
You’ve seen The Wire right? Like you, we just want our stuff now. They’re called shipping costs because ships cost a lot to run. Our ship runs across the city on wheels. Better. - Quality. Lost in translation isn’t just a movie. Imagine ordering 5000 garments and somebody forgot a zero here or there. Well it costs a lot more than zero to fix that error. Who are you going to blame? Are you good at arguing in Chinese on the phone? We’re not. We get to see things here, sign off on things here, with folks in the local community. Lucky for all of us.
- Labour standards. Something we have. Let’s pretend we were manufacturing overseas for a minute. We decide to fly there, visit the production facility and see how everything is going. Odds are it’s going to look great, until we leave. We all tidy up our desks before the boss comes by, and pretend to work hard. But seriously, let’s pay people a living wage to make amazing things. Paying a low wage does nobody any good. We can drive across town and see our stuff being produced by happy people.
Our goal isn’t to flood the market with cheap stuff. Our goal is to create special products with a minimal carbon footprint, which is also good for business efficiency.