In a Sea of Instagram Fashion Brands, William Lasry Finds the Best Ones at the Source
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A real clotheshorse likely already knows about Stussy and Carhartt, but perhaps not 22AMPS. And yet, all three share the same level of craftsmanship, having been produced from the same manufacturer: Venedik Textile, in Turkey.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone and their sister started a fashion brand. COVID-19 and the Great Resignation begat an entrepreneurship boom, and it turns out that many people had Project Runway ambitions. That passion (and, quite frankly, talent) didn’t always translate to good clothes, though. In fact, the sudden glut of Instagram brands producing subpar final products seems inescapable, though it isn’t entirely the fault of the new companies’ ideas. Their garments are often made in factories that skimp on quality, and finding manufacturers that don’t do so is a needle-in-haystack enterprise for newcomers to the industry.
William Lasry, 24, is aware of that roadblock. Over the past few years, he’s toured about 50 factories around the world, posting videos of the ones he likes and endorses on his Instagram. For a small fee, startups can subscribe to Lasry’s Patreon and learn what factories are crafting garments well. Inversely, fashion collectors and enthusiasts can see which new brands are using the same high-quality factories as their favorite brands to discover a new standout designer.
Lasry’s goal is to show products that manufacturers have made in the past, brands they’ve produced for, and factories’ minimum quantities and price ranges. It means that small brands get a sherpa to guide them through the world of quality manufacturing, and fashion followers discover a treasure trove of great, under-the-radar brands producing clothes at the same places as catalog companies; Lasry’s subscribers get a head start on owning something by the next Junya Watanabe, for instance, knowing that the designer shares a manufacturer with the Japan-based brand Nonnative.
Lasry calls his workshop reconnaissance “Glass Factory,” based on the premise that he’s making manufacturing transparent. His experience running his own brand in college — a now-defunct streetwear brand called Wun-Off — means he knows firsthand how hard it is to identify a good manufacturer. Before that, his introduction to that world was through his father, who ran a denim manufacturing business for 30 years, which is how he started visiting factories in the first place.
And those visits proved valuable, he tells SPY.
“There’s a disconnect between the brand and the manufacturing process,” he says, adding that in a lot of countries, it’s crucial to have a middle man. In his experience, many factories in Turkey and Italy, for instance, try to take advantage of new entrepreneurs, overcharging for their services and prioritizing their existing roster of clients.
“You need to be well-prepared to reach out to these brands,” he says. “You need to have every single detail — your trimmings, measurements — planned out well in advance.”
The exponential growth of fast fashion over the past few decades hasn’t helped, either. According to the Industrial Designers Society of America, industrial designers typically focus on appearance, functionality, and manufacturability, but most of the changes have been happening in the last step. Companies are cutting corners to get clothes out faster, creating global environmental, health, and labor issues.
Many brands aren’t overseeing their products once they’re in a factory’s hands, Lasry says.
“Most of the brands that got started on Instagram in the last two years have not visited their factories — I guarantee it,” he adds. “And if they did, they would see things they didn’t want to see.”
Lasry builds relationships with manufacturers by reaching out to them directly. When he asks to tour their facilities and film their setups, he says that they are often surprised but are pleased by the idea of exposure and new customers.
Take one video of Lasry at TadaKnit — a factory in Okayama, Japan, with only 10 employees — that he says manufactures for Purple Label North Face, Real McCoys, and Beams Japan knitwear products, in addition to smaller brands. “They’re experts in cutting and sewing with some of the most well-trained staff I’ve ever seen,” Lasry says “They do T-shirts, hoodies, crewnecks, and polos for many Japanese brands. I had the pleasure of interviewing Tada [Shigekazu] himself and then getting a tour of the factory from him. Every single product in their repertoire was beautifully crafted,” he adds, before showing a copy of Shigekazu’s business card at the end of the video.
A middleman is necessary, Lasry argues, and he positions himself as an indispensable one for the manufacturers he recommends. Some companies, like California-based manufacturer Argyle Haus, reach out to Lasry directly, too.
“Not every company works the way we do and I understand the need to have an experienced middleman to assist,” Houman Salem, Argyle’s founder, tells SPY. “[Middlemen] are hard to find and can oftentimes be quite expensive, but with proper vetting, it would be advantageous to have someone with experience guide you through the process if you’re working with companies that don’t provide the consultation the way we do.”
People who subscribe to Lasry’s Patreon who are launching — or looking to launch — new brands say that the process of finding good manufacturers and establishing relationships with them is frequently mystifying.
Lasry references bad experiences he’s had shopping on Alibaba, for example, one of the world’s largest retailers. It reported $248 billion in transactions on its platform last year, more than eBay and Amazon combined. Alibaba’s novelty is that it’s a wholesale marketplace for consumers looking to buy a large quantity of an item at once, negotiate with manufacturers, and create custom items. The quality, however, varies greatly — a cursory search across startup subreddits shows that there’s a whole internet underground for new brands trading information on how to find a reliable manufacturer on Alibaba.
Nicolae Loghin, 24, for instance, is a fashion designer and founder of the London-based streetwear brand wonderkid. He tells SPY that his foray into fashion was complicated by the kind of manufacturing woes that users are often talking about on those subreddits.
Loghin has been making clothes for six years under different brand names of his own, only now feeling confident enough in the final look and product to keep going with wonderkid. He says that at the start of his career, he placed more than 20 orders with manufacturers where details would be slightly off, such as stitches under a hoodie’s armpit not meeting at the same point.
Loghin echoes Lasry, saying that his output improved once he built relationships with manufacturers over time — and learned about the processes behind production in more detail. “I note how fast they want to move into production,” he gives as an example. “No respectable manufacturer will rush through sampling and pattern drafting.”
That’s the gambit for new brands looking to earn their stripes in the fashion industry. For Lasry’s audience of fashion enthusiasts, the goal is finding out what the hidden gem brands are. Lasry and Salem both tell SPY that bigger brands will often have manufacturers sign NDAs, meaning that they can’t advertise that the companies make their products there. It’s to preserve the secrecy that’s so characteristic of the industry; it also hides that the factories are capable of handling brands with very different sensibilities. Unialsitex in Turkey covers both Philip Plein and The Gap, for instance, according to Lasry’s spreadsheet.
It also ensures that the quality of sought-after brands remains rare — and that those brands can distinguish themselves from startup competitors on the hunt.
In one video, Lasry spotlights the Italian manufacturer Olmetex, for example, a fabric supplier for Chrome Hearts, which is fairly popular. The Hong-Kong based brand Nilmance, however, is far less renowned but also sources its fabrics from Olmetex, producing its own variety of high-concept technical jackets and flight pants — looks that are unique, well-made, and for the savvy shopper, standouts in a crowd.
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