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Dasmarinas Sewing Workshop |
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It's been one month now since I arrived in Philippines and during the past weeks we have been very busy: One of the major objective of Capalongas is to create a sewing workshop that will provide means of income to dressmakers without jobs in the community of Dasmarinas (in the suburbs of Manila). This workshop will be use to produce Capalongas collection and also to accept jobs for local orders, like school uniforms. As you can imagine putting up a workshop from scratches and with limited budget is not an easy thing to do.
The entrance to Dasmarinas subdivision
When I left Philippines last year we put up a "embryo" of this workshop. Which means dressmakers that are ready to invest in this project, head of the shop is an experienced tailor and of course the place we had was a squatted house, with electricity connected from the neighbor and machines were borrowed from the neighbors left and right. In fact, they were all second hand assembled from different pieces. The positive thing about this was that the prototype and the production test made proved to be of high quality finishing.
The former workshop
Unfortunately during my six months absence in Philippines due to lack of income, the machines were either sold, or pawned. And to top it all that, the owner of the squatted house our head of the shop to leave the place. We imagined to have better workshop but not in such a short notice! I thus spent these last weeks to find a new place to rent: what we found easily were the ones in such a pitiful condition (smashed doors, broken down roofs, no water nor electricity… etc). After several weeks of searching, we finally found a place ideal for our workshop. There are still some work to be done: arranging the place, buying the machines and conditioning them. Fortunately we had anticipated this kind of problems and we had voluntarily established a very broad planning: these small risks will not thus have any impact on the date of release of our collection.
The house we refused
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