From the workshop, Sunday afternoon #8

Tasmania has a population under 600,000. Spread out, mostly along the coast, thinner the further you get from Hobart. Somewhere in that number are the people who can sew heavy canvas and oilskin properly. Not many. And nowhere near all of them live close enough to drive to my workshop.

You may or may not remember from some newsletter earlier in the year, or perhaps it was even last year, that I had help in the workshop - it wasn't just me anymore, it was also Campbell. He was coming into the workshop every week, we'd sew, listen to music, chat about boats, put logs in the fire. But, then he moved, quite far away. Still Tasmania, but, far enough away that it wasn't possible to come into the workshop.

What to do?

Most weeks I meet him, or his mum, or his partner in a car park in Hobart. Sometimes the side of the road. I hand him a bag of cut panels, hardware, thread. In return I get a bag of finished pieces and an invoice. To anyone driving past, this whole setup looks more like something worth calling the police about than the epitome of a cottage industry.

He's paid by the piece, not the hour. No clocking on, no one watching the clock for him. He works when it suits him, around whatever else his week looks like. The work still gets done, it just doesn't all get done in my workshop anymore.

Design, cutting and finishing are centralised, because that's where consistency lives and where the Kohutt look actually gets decided. Some (not all) of the sewing is then pushed out to people who are good at it and want to work on their own schedule, in their own space, paid for what they make rather than the hours they sit still.

It's a slower way to scale than hiring a floor of machinists. It probably always will be. But it means the people doing the work have some say over their own time, which feels like the whole point of building something small & ethical in the first place. I don't want a factory. I want more Campbells.

The vision I see for Kohutt is not of a lone maker toiling away. It is a symbiotic, decentralised brand which represents the best of what work, quality and craft can be, practically, philosophically, morally.

Some years ago I bought a legendary Singer 269W bartack machine off a young Vietnamese man in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. He was selling it on behalf of his then-retiring parents, who could not speak English. It was an unusual machine to own, and we got to talking about why he was selling it. His parents had migrated from Vietnam and the only marketable skills they had were sewing. There was a period of time in the 1990s, before mass outsourcing happened, where families, predominantly migrants, set up contract sewing workshops in their houses and backyards. These small workshops would take on sewing contracts for tracksuit pants, jeans, shirts and more, from major retailers like Kmart, Target and others. They were paid by the piece and worked when they could, between making dinner, taking their kids to school and everything else that modern life demands. It was WFH before WFH. This idea never left me.

Some years later I would come across a variation on this idea: Harris Tweed. By law, every metre of their hand woven fabric has to be woven on a treadle loom in the weaver's own home. Raw materials are dropped off from the mill by a person in a small van. A week later the same person turns up and picks up finished goods. The spinning, the dyeing and the finishing is centralised, done at mills in the Outer Hebrides. The craft is decentralised. The cloth only earns the coveted Orb stamp once an independent inspector checks it against the standard after pickup. It's a semi-industrial process where it needs to be, but a human process where it matters more.

A human, craft process. Picture the version of production we've normalised without quite noticing: sharp lighting, rows of machinists, floor managers, a clock neither of you controls. Now picture the version we actually mean when we say human: someone laughing at their bench, taking their kid to school before finishing a seam, getting something wrong and doing it again properly.

Synthesised intelligence is coming for a lot of things. I don't think it's coming for that. If there's an answer to what unsettles people about it, it isn't competing with it. It's being harder to automate than a machine can manage - a bit slow, occasionally wrong, still turning up, human.

Kohutt is accidentally on purpose the antithesis of mass manufacturing, of automation, of synthesised intelligence. Stitch by stitch it is an expression of craft, of quality, of work, of ideas, of what could be. I have some ideas about where I would like to steer this ship, and the next couple of newsletters are going to delve into it a bit deeper.

More soon, probably from a carpark,

Nick