Balancing Production

Despite bracing for the New England's first big snow storm of the year, I had a great visit yesterday to the New Balance shoe manufacturing plant in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Accompanied by a public radio journalist–decked out in head phones, recorder, and mic–who is working on a piece about this project, I piled in a friend's car and headed north. Though it had taken about a month to work out logistics and schedules, everyone at New Balance that I came in contact with has been incredibly welcoming and accommodating. In fact, they aren't actually set up to provide public tours, but as the only athletic shoe manufacturer left in the United States (they make 25% of their footwear here in Lawrence and in three other locations in Maine and Boston) they were sympathetic to my mission and pulled out all the stops.

We were actually shown around by Claudio Gelman, plant manager of this facility for the past 13 years. An Argentinian by birth, Claudio came to Framingham, MA, as a high school exchange student and fell in love with the state. After getting his engineering degree in Israel, he moved back, got married, and settled in. As plant manager, he is passionate about the process of making shoes effectively and efficiently, down to finding the last hundredth of a second that can be shaved from the production time. I was once again amazed at how hands-on the process is, with highly skilled individual line workers manning presses and sewing machines to get every detail right in the shortest amount of time. Though Claudio told us that most of 'his people' had been there for 15+ years, I wondered how such a tight ship could be a pleasant enough place to work, until we were about to head out and we heard a crackling PA system come to life with a worker's unscripted rendition of Silent Night, followed by an off-key Feliz Navidad. Every worker on the floor laughed and hollered, grinning from ear to ear. All while working fingers and machines, not missing a beat.

Getting Carded

As things get rolling with my design work (click "Studio" above), it's become clear that I am in desperate need of some new updated business cards. I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out how getting these cards was going to fit into the consumer project, when I came across Virgil O. Stamps, a local letterpress printing company that is all about customization and unique products. With some snooping, I was able to meet up with his collaborator, designer Sarah Coffman of minus-five. Turns out that Sarah lives in my neighborhood!

We met up for coffee one afternoon about a week or so ago and she told be about moving from Texas to New York and bouncing from job to job before hooking up with the Virgil project. A few days later she took me out to the studio in New Jersey, a virtual wonderland for a designer as it's strewn about with metal type alphabets, ancient-looking letterpress machines, type samples and specimens, developing negatives clothespinned up, and cartons of chipboard and printed projects ready to go out. She walked me through the whole process of exposing designs onto film to make the negative, then exposing the chemically-treated plate to the negative, which basically burns away everything that's not to be printed. Amazingly cool nerd-science. This week I'm headed back out to learn the printing part of the process by working on my own set of cards.

On a much sour-er note: I've got some back-peddling to do as I was forced to break the project on Friday night. Earlier in the day, my life-blood–otherwise known as my MacBook Pro notebook computer–was stolen from my locker at the YMCA where I swim everyday. After much deliberation and hand-wringing, I got a loan and went to Tekserv to replace it. Thanks to frequent back-ups, I was able to restore everything and get back on track. It's incredibly unfortunate, on so many levels, and I'm going to do my best to pursue the production chain. Advice/assistance very welcome.