Nov 29, 2019
I have a mountain of stories from the two years I spent developing the Konny Carrier Warmer, Konny Momswear and the Konny Baby Carrier Summer included. But since I've already started, I think I should tell you the story up to the warmer's launch before I start on anything else.
In the first half of 2018, I was in a frenzy trying to develop the Konny Baby Carrier Summer. I made almost 20 versions of the carrier, changing nothing but the fabric. And in the end I gave up on it, again. (How finished a product is comes before when it launches, after all.) Giving up on a launch twice in a row made me wonder whether I was really someone who could pull this off, but I couldn't just sit there feeling defeated. Whether I lost heart or not, winter was coming, and this season I really wanted to get it right.
When I started planning the warmer again, I slowly went back over why I hadn't been able to finish developing it the year before. Once I had sorted out my thoughts, I saw that the problems started at the point where I had decided to develop the design together with a contract manufacturer. In 2017, to save time and effort, I was designing the warmer with a contract manufacturer. I would explain the direction I wanted, the manufacturer would make it, I would give feedback, they would revise it, and that was how the prototypes got made. Knowledge of sewing, fabrics and materials, plus years in the business: everything the manufacturer had was something I didn't. Every meeting made me feel the work was moving forward, and it was definitely much faster than when I was figuring things out alone.
The problem was that working with the manufacturer left me with nothing of my own. I didn't have much experience in design or production, so my style is to start from the very bottom. I do a storm of research, study, form a hypothesis, make it myself, go around the markets looking for the right materials, make the samples myself, and only gain confidence once I've touched them, put them on and used them with my own hands. (I'm a really slow learner.) All the while I keep asking myself, as a customer, whether I would actually pay money for this product. What I push forward after thinking it through that thoroughly comes slowly, but I'm confident in my choices and can sell it more confidently than anyone. (Like our baby carrier and our momswear.)
With a manufacturer in the middle, though, I had no chance to learn on my own and gain that confidence. Most things were decided within the options they put in front of me. I would name the unit price I wanted to sell the product at, and they would take their margin out of it and choose the fabric and trims to fit. "Isn't there a better fabric than this? I'd like it softer and cozier." "Then the unit cost won't work." Or, "This quality is the best you'll find in the wholesale fabric market. Most companies use about this level." Those were the answers I got. No wonder I was never satisfied.
'At least when I'm developing something, let's not try to save time, effort or money. Once the experience builds up, the savings will come on their own…'
So for the 2018 release, I made up my mind to make it myself, from the ground up. I called the teacher at the sample room where we had made the baby carrier (in Korea we call a master in a sample room "teacher"). "Teacher, there's a product I want to make properly, even if it takes a little longer. I'll buy every fabric that looks good and send them all to you." I went around the wholesale markets collecting every fabric that looked good: faux shearling, fleece, bonded fabric with two layers joined back to back, cashmere coat fabric, thermal fabric… I bought nearly every fabric used for winter outerwear, talked over the shape of the garment with the teacher at the sample room, and chose the final fabric. "Erin, you have an eye for fabric. I think you picked really well this time." One word of approval from a teacher who had spent a whole life making high-end clothes, and the corners of my mouth kept twitching.
When developing the warmer's shape, what I focused on above all was one mission: "make going out in winter lighter." Putting it on couldn't be a hassle. As a way to keep the baby warm, it couldn't fall short, but it also couldn't get buried in keeping warm alone. Like the Konny Baby Carrier, it had to look good both when worn with the baby and when you had it on by itself, without the baby. It shouldn't feel like draping some random baby product over yourself; in shape it should be as close as possible to the everyday clothes you normally wear… I wrote out the full spec of the warmer I wanted to design, and to get there I had to wipe the usual warmers on the market out of my head before I even started.
The Konny Carrier Warmer was a design that didn't exist anywhere in the world, and there was no product to refer to, so it took several months just to make a proper sample. Every time a sample was finished, I wore it myself, sent it to team members for feedback, and fixed it, over and over, so even revising one sample took one to two weeks. As it happened, that year we had a designer with 10 years of experience who had joined to develop our momswear. The designer went in and out of the sample room with me every day and saw me floundering on bare ground more closely than anyone. One day came a remark, almost in passing: "I've honestly never seen anyone make clothes like this. What number full sew is this, anyway? Haha"
The truth is, until then I knew absolutely nothing about what a "full sew" was… Making clothes usually starts with what's called "basting": you rough out the garment's shape with basting thread that pulls apart easily, do a fitting, decide on the changes, and then sew it properly, which is called a "full sew." A basted garment is just fabric loosely pieced together with all the details left out (not even pockets), so you can't really know or test how the garment works; you can only see the fit. To save time and money, people usually go straight from basting to the full sew, but I was revising through full sew > full sew > full sew > full sew > full sew, so I guess it looked frustrating to watch.
A full sew is the process of making a real garment, so the samples cost a lot and, above all, took a long time. But the carrier warmer I wanted to make wasn't a garment that only needed a nice fit. It had to actually do its job, so I felt the right answer was to do full sews and revise as real moms wore them, washed them and lived in them. That way we could learn ahead of time the downsides customers would feel, fix them before launch, and put out a well-finished garment.
After months of making and revising samples like this, the Konny Carrier Warmer finally launched. When I first started going in and out of the sample room I was definitely in short sleeves, but by the time I walked out with the sample for launch I was wearing a coat. I just barely found a factory in Korea, and we were able to start selling at the end of October. The result was a success, because every batch sold out as soon as it was made!
I've often seen customers using the Konny Baby Carrier, but since I'm always shut away indoors working, I've never really seen a customer wearing the warmer. Still, seeing that everything we made for the first season sold out… lots of people all over the country must be using it, right? :)
The first thing I do every day when I get to work is read the review board, and every day I'm deeply moved. "No lie, the stuff I take out in the middle of winter is cut by a third. It's a whole new world." "The more Konny products I buy, the more I think a mom who really went through hard-core parenting made these herself by fixing what bothered her… Thank you so much."
Oh no, dear customer. Really, I'm the one who's truly grateful.