Hasta La Ideas

Just last month I returned from a few weeks in India where my partners and I were meeting with our partner NGO to discuss new product designs in the new year for our boutique brand, Holstee. Holstee is a company built on a basic idea: Living a dream and sharing that passion with others. We create products and shine a light on other designers who, like us, are dedicated to sustainable production through our webstore, Curated x Holstee. In the short time since we’ve launched the brand we have been fortunate to have found such great production partners, but we have also learned a lot along the way to help make every round of production go smoother than the last.

Original Holstee Tee sketch

In May 2009 my brother Mike and I made the decision to work full-time on a pet project we had been working on, Holstee, a T-shirt with a holster-position pocket made out of 100% recycled material. After six months on a huge learning curve—trying to catch up on design and production basics, we launched our first line of Holstee Recycled Tees with jersey made from 100% recycled plastic bottles, milled, cut and sewn within 150 miles of each other in North Carolina. A few months later, my brother Mike needed a new wallet. We sketched out our dream wallet—a minimalist carry-all with enough storage for all the basics plus a sliding window for IDs or transit cards&emdash;and teamed up with a NGO in India that had perfected a method of using plastic bags collected off the streets of Delhi to create a unique 100% upcycled textile with leather-like qualities. Three weeks after a short video chat with the NGO, we got a prototype in our hands.

Here are four key learnings we picked up on while working with an overseas partner for production. Hopefully our learnings will help other designer/entrepreneurs.

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