A manufacturing studio in Portland, run by two people who have spent their careers making things.
There's a guy…
How we met
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 shared a fascination with old sewing machines and a view that technology is only a means to an end; their past businesses had been built around making customers happy. Both were looking for something new to work on, and the result was ApparelWerks — a manufacturing and product development studio in Portland creating made-to-measure clothing.
The bet
One-piece flow
The fashion industry's economics are built on volume — which means most brands choose both manufacturing they don't control and sizing that doesn't fit their customers. Unfortunately, the cost of volume is waste - clothes not fitting, not selling, or not even getting in front of consumers.
We're tackling that problem from the opposite end; could we make each garment for a specific person? That's what led us here. Each piece is finished before the next one starts, by a team that fixes problems as they appear instead of pushing them down a line. Quality compounds, not defects. Once you can get that one-at-a-time model to work at some scale, doing "custom" sizing — or just different sizing from one piece to the next — costs almost nothing, because nothing is made in batches. MOQ of 1.
Steven Heard & Rick Levine
Steven Heard
Steven 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 patternmaker 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.
Steven founded pattern service bureau Clinton Park, doing garment development and pattern work for national and start-up brands; he became the go-to patternmaker for denim development. In 2014 he founded Japanese-inspired San Francisco denim and workwear brand Dillon Montara, and was the development and manufacturing partner behind Portland's Ship John brand.
Rick Levine
Rick is the engineering black sheep in a family of artists. His father was a ceramist and designer who made and used tools to create mid-century ceramic tile and lamps on a large scale; Rick grew up around clay and machinery. He started his career as a producer and editor for film and video, then moved into programming tools and user interfaces for computer systems — Sun Microsystems early in its existence, then a series of start-ups.
In 2006, Rick followed his interest in manufacturing automation to found chocolate brand Sun Cups, repurposing industrial-scale chocolate techniques to make artisanal, organic, nut-free chocolates available in thousands of stores. In 2013 he co-founded sock company XOAB with his brother, designer Neil Levine, building a domestic supply chain and using 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.
Visit
Come by the studio
Drop in, call, or email. Studio visits don't need to be appointments — if you want to see how we work, talk through an idea, or ask about made-to-measure jeans, we'd rather hear from you sooner than later.
120 SW Grover St, Suite 100
Portland, Oregon 97239
