Facing a pivotal crossroad, we considered two options to continue making our jeans: another local production manager in Los Angeles, and a factory in San Francisco who we had first met with a few years back. Because we were based in LA, we opted for proximity and went with the local option. It made most sense on paper since everything was a short drive away and the manager had extensive experience. But that’s where things went south. Communication was consistently challenging with the production manager, and at one point he completely stopped returning phone calls and messages when we tried to get status updates on our jeans. As a small business, we were all-in on every production run - meaning, we would take all of the cash we had to produce as many jeans as we could on every production run. The order that was in limbo represented the bulk of our assets and, therefore, the ability to earn revenue and start another run of jeans thereafter. If we lost the order, it could have sunk our business.

We were left with no other recourse but to try and track him down face to face. We drove over to one of the factories we had met him at before, in hopes of getting a more concrete update on our order. He wasn't there – but we did speak to the sewing floor manager there, who told us that he had not heard from or seen our production manager in weeks and was pretty sure that he’d left the country. What’s more, he informed us that he and his team had not been paid by our manager, so they had stopped working on our jeans. We found the garments in an assortment of bundles of semi-completion. In order to rescue what belonged to us, we agreed to pay the lead sewer what he and his team were owed, even though we had already paid the production manager for this same order.

Our unassembled jeans led us to Freda and her factory in San Francisco, Skyblue. This relationship began atypically; it’s not often where a client’s first order consists of reassembling an incomplete production run. Imagine having a few dozen people start puzzles, taking them away halfway through, and asking another team of people to complete them. In retrospect, we are so thankful to them for bailing us out from such a difficult situation. We’ve grown together with them over the past 8+ years to where Skyblue makes almost everything we sell now: tees, jeans, bottoms, shirts, and jackets. They’ve become more than just partners, too. They’re part of 3sixteen’s family. We stop by every few months to check in and have gotten to know them well. We get birthday gifts for each others’ kids. We cater meals for the sewers.