Reddit - Ask me Anything (AMA)

[seawolf]

Good luck G! Should be interesting.

[Friday]

All the best G-San. Most definitely a good thing all around for the business and also the brand as a whole.

[davito]

Good luck G, interesting

[irishexpat]

i might peek in on my lunch hour at work…

so pumped about this! my 2 denim families coming together

[Giles]

Here we go:

http://redd.it/1v4988

[Aetas]

What a surprise cone of questions.

And so many answers:
"With most denims we weave, we lose a known percentage to 2nd and 3rd quality. With our 25oz, we lose a completely unknown percentage, it varies between 15% and 75%. Because the denim is so tough, the looms sometimes (and we still don't know exactly why) just grind to a halt. When we restart, the next 1" of denim is junk, as the loom is getting up to speed. If we get junk every 2 feet, we can't make a single pair of jeans out of that bolt….
Every single inch of our denim is viewed by a QC person as it is drawn over a strong light source, this allows us to see any imperfections in the weave. Unfortunately the operatives are human and sometimes miss a fault, this section of denim then gets made into a pair of jeans and obviously they have a fault in them. We do normally spot these lemons when QCing in Hachioji before labels are applied, but even the people in QC Hachioji are human and so occasionally miss one of these faults.
I reckon in the 8 years I have been working with Haraki, I have seen 20 pairs of bad jeans……"

Hats off to you.

[Seul]

G - hang in there… I'll read up on your answers tomorrow with some tea 

[Giles]

Thanks Seul….

[simonc]

Well that all went very well I thought.

[mclaincausey]

Giles killed that AMA, someone said it was one of the most informative that they've had and I'm inclined to agree. Giles got into manufacture and went beyond the "what cut is right for me" kind of stuff that often occupies a lot of the AMAs.

[irishexpat]

real good stuff.

[beautiful_FrEaK]

That was a good read. Thanks

[Giles]

Thanks guys….

[Snowy]

That was a great read. Some good questions and good answers. Thanks for doing it.

[jdl1279]

This was really informative, the turnover on the 25oz How the hell do you find profits in that? Makes me appreciate the cranky bastards that much more. The variables I was unaware of and details G covered (thread detail and count, man knows his stuff) were impressive both because he just fired it off, and because the audience seemed to care about it as it was laid out. Thanks for taking the time Giles, I learned something from it all, and that will bring me back every time.

[Giles]

Yep, last but one time we ran a weave of the 25oz, we bought back USD12,000 of 2nd and 3rd rate fabric from the mill…....

[jdl1279]

Wow, that's gotta make folks buying from Japan sting all the more (sorry knowing as I do now I would have dug deeper, promise you'll get the balance in the long run). Do you know with all of that where you end up per pair? Sorry I can be off, profit margins and debt footprints interest me.

[Seul]

Your praise and kind words for Haraki-san (and vice versa) is touching  Made for a great read, G!..

[davito]

Well done G great insights like always. Thanks

[Giles]

@jdl1279:

Wow, that's gotta make folks buying from Japan sting all the more (sorry knowing as I do now I would have dug deeper, promise you'll get the balance in the long run). Do you know with all of that where you end up per pair? Sorry I can be off, profit margins and debt footprints interest me.

We work on the basis that we do not need to make the same margin off everything we sell.  Margins on silver, leather and the 25oz are awful.  If that was all we sold, we'd go bust.  But we strive for an average margin that is acceptable, so yes, we make more on some items (the IH-634S being a prime example - we make so many of them our costs are reasonably low)…...