Jogo em! Vamos!

I usually write these on Tuesday nights, just a brain dump of my thoughts and the challenges ahead. This week I'm in Portugal with?Mugsy . Team offsite to see a factory, team building, bring (almost) everyone together to connect and collaborate before the final push of the year. Today I’m writing from a bus in the hills of Portugal outside Porto as we head to a vineyard..Jogo Em!?

Two topics this week…clothing and comfort.?

Clothing:

The clothing industry is absolutely wild when you see the underbelly of the beas. How product gets made into the clothes we wear each day is incredibly time-intensive and labor + resource heavy. What it takes to take raw fabric and turn it into a finished sellable product blows my mind seeing it in real life. I've worked for apparel companies my entire career, and this was my first visit to any factory.?

Mugsy has some production in Portugal, and we started our trip with a visit to a fabric mill just outside Guimarès. Then we hit a cut and sew factory close by where we make our flannel shirts and button downs.

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The Mill

A piece of clothing could consist of anywhere between one and five types of materials, the majority of which is cotton or polyester, but could also include spandex, linen, rayon, bamboo, hemp, etc. Someone hand-picks these materials from all over the world and sends them to a mill, where raw materials are spun, processed, combined, and treated into massive spools of fabric.?

Watching someone take tiny little threads and turn it into a blanket of flannel is a sight to see. The threads are stored in small spools of all kinds of colors. To create fabric, someone has to line up hundreds of tiny threads by hand, sometimes in a specific color sequence or fabric order. Painfully detailed and intensive to get the desired effect. The machinery to weave the strings together was insane to see in person, you watch black and brown threads woven into a plaid or a stripe and you’ll appreciate your flannel shirt way more.?

After you've got fabric in bulk, there's a number of treatments to clean it, dye fabric to a specific color or look, soften it to a certain hand feel, or treat it with different properties (anti-smell, water repellent, etc). An entire warehouse was dedicated to these massive machines that process thousands of pounds of fabric a day, washing, drying, dying, heating, finishing, or brushing to the desired effect or hand feel.?

Next stop…the cut and sew factory.?

The yards of fabric first get cut, either by hand or by a massive die-cut machine into a specific pattern. Sleeves, front pieces, and back piece of the shirt, collar, pockets, etc. There’s never a perfect cut, so there’s always excess fabric that gets discarded, but watching this happen for 20 minutes you realize how many pieces are needed to make a shirt.?

The pieces are organized and sent to a sewing line, where individual workers like an assembly line sew a specific piece together, add details like buttons or pockets, plackets, collars, and trims, then ironing, inspecting, and packaging up to be sent to our warehouse to sell. The whole process takes upwards of 50 individual sewers, carefully and skillfully making every piece standardized.?

Watching this process gave me a new appreciation for how our clothes are made. How the finer details of a shirt or a pair of jeans come together to show up at your door. To this that clothing at one point was entirely hand made…?

Comfort:

I never realized how much I appreciated the comfort of home until this trip. I'd never traveled over the Atlantic before, never taken a flight over 5 hours. There is nothing more humbling than walking around a city alone, trying to figure out how to navigate, how to transact, how to buy food and water, or listening to everyone around you speaking in a foreign language.?

Breakfast was my first experience; all the food was labeled in Portuguese, with various muffins, cakes, juices, eggs, breads, yogurts, cereals, and coffee. Your sense of comfort in knowing what to eat and how it will taste is gone. It’s invigorating and exhausting to make this many decisions that are usually on autopilot.?

Bottles of water are way less available than in US hotels, and tap water could send your trip down a spiral if you aren’t careful. Navigating conversations with the front desk, staff, and room service creates another hurdle. It’s amazing how much I’ve taken these things for granted when traveling in the US.?

I walked into a grocery store to buy some snacks, walked around for 20 minutes and left with two bottles of water. My ability to function has been seriously compromised, but I kind of love it.?

All that to say, I cannot wait to have the comfort of home, be back on US soil. Today was our last day in Portugal. But tomorrow…we had to Istanbul…then Cairo…?

See ya next week…