About
Who we are
Steven and Rick were introduced when Rick was looking into body scanning for a problem his daughter, an engineer, was trying to solve. "There's a guy in Portland who's been making customized clothing for decades. He knows all about scanners and measurement."
They discovered a shared appreciation for manufacturing technology, a fascination with old sewing machines, and a view that tech is only a means to an end; their past businesses were focused on making customers happy. Both were also looking for something new and interesting to do, and the result was starting ApparelWerks, a manufacturing and product development studio in Portland creating made-to-measure clothing.
Steven Heard has decades of experience making clothing, starting at the Levi Strauss factory on Valencia Street in San Francisco, at a time when all patterns and samples for the company were still created there. He was a senior pattern-maker for Levi's Dockers brand, and went on to spearhead the world’s first large-scale bespoke jeans production, leveraging body scanning technology to craft custom jeans for thousands of consumers. He founded pattern service bureau Clinton Park, doing garment development and pattern work for numerous national and start-up brands, and developed a reputation for being the go-to patternmaker for denim development. He went on to found Japanese-inspired San Francisco denim and workwear brand Dillon Montara in 2014, and was the development and manufacturing partner behind Portland's Ship John brand.
Rick Levine is the engineering black sheep in a family of artists. His father was a ceramist and designer, making and using tools to create mid-century ceramic tile and lamps on a large scale. Rick spent a lot of his time growing up around clay and machinery. Rick started his career as a producer and editor for film and video, and stepped sideways into programming tools and user interfaces for computer systems. He worked at Sun Microsystems early in its existence, and then at a series of start-ups. In 2006, Rick followed his interest in manufacturing automation to found chocolate brand Sun Cups. He repurposed industrial-scale chocolate techniques to create artisanal, organic, nut-free chocolates and made them available in thousands of stores. In 2013, he and his brother, designer Neil Levine, founded sock company XOAB, focusing on creating comfortable socks with a broad palette of Merino wool and Supima® cotton colors. They created a domestic supply chain, and used modified knitting machines and pattern analysis software to take new designs from sketch to shelf in less than a week, a capability unique in the hosiery industry.
