Another day, another blazer. Jessica, our new me, and I woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to head out to the factory and inspect the latest surge of orders for the holiday season. We dashed onto a train jammed pack with the usual chickens and ducks on their first and last commute to the eventual dinner table somewhere in the Chinese interior.

After our long and smelly train ride, we arrived in JiaXing as we always do, and headed straight for the factory, which is a 5 min cab ride from the train station. We measured and checked every single blazer as usual, and as our volumes were especially large this time, we took our sweet time to do it. Our factory is getting pretty automatic, and I am loving it. A few oversights here and there are always going to happen, and that’s why we check the hell out of these things. But in general, they are pretty spot on.

We send all of our orders automatically from the website. So basically what happens is when you order, our back end faxes those orders to the factory and our guys start working on it immediately. The system automatically translates all of your design choices into Chinese, and all your measurements into centimeters, placing them on an order sheet which finds its way around the factory as the blazer gets made. Pretty cool huh? I designed the system and built it for a few hundred bucks, gotta love the Chinese graduate students…

So as we were testing, I noticed that some of you are getting REALLY creative and some of the designs are quite astonishing in their subtle sleekness. While I was looking closer at one of them, I bent down behind one of our lovely workers and literally came close to certain chaos. The worker was sewing a button on by hand, and reached back far with every thread pulled through. I was looking at an especially cool design and she cocked back, needle in hand, literally dodging my eye by 4 milimeters. Thankfully I had taken yet another closer look at some stitching when she did this because had I been in my original position, I’d probably be on a plane back to America right now to see an eye specialist to remove the needle in my eye, and a psychiatrist to help me deal with the fact that every kid’s worst fear had just occurred, to me. As I shuddered at how close I had just came with certain disturbia, the factory workers erupted with laughter around me, their dream had come true, a white kid couldn’t hack it in the factory and it was overtly obvious. I have a habit of stubbing my toe, I can’t even imagine the kind of injuries I’d have if I had to do some sort of physical labor…I’ll stick to the gym.

After a few deep breaths and a lot of orders perfectly reflecting their order list, I got on the bus back to Shanghai and that’s where I’m writing this now. Another day at the factory, another dumb move by me, and a lot of happy customers on the way!