Why I've kept Goddess Gear close to home

Why I've Kept Goddess Gear Close to Home

Making clothing is a strange mix of simple and complicated. Someone has a design idea. A pattern is drafted. Fabric is sourced, cut, and stitched into something a person will wear. Every step takes real skill, and every step is a place where things can go sideways.

When I started Goddess Gear over two decades ago, producing locally wasn't something I weighed against other options. It was just how I was going to do it. Two things mattered most to me: I wanted to see the quality with my own eyes, and I wanted the work — and the money — to stay in my community. There are plenty of beautiful, well-made clothing lines built overseas, sewn by people who need the work as much as anyone here does. That's real. But this was a brand-new career for me, with a steep learning curve and a hundred ways to get it wrong — a seam in the wrong spot, the wrong thread color, a pattern marked off by a fraction of an inch. Small mistakes in this business aren't small. Staying close let me catch them.

It also meant staying small on purpose. I made what I could realistically sell in a season, then started again the next one. I'd rather do that than chase the kind of scale that pushes a small brand into gambling on huge minimum orders overseas — where if something's wrong, you don't find out until the box arrives and it's too late to fix. Smaller production runs mean I can keep trying new fabrics and new styles instead of locking myself into one bet a year in advance. That's not a limitation. That's the whole reason the collection still feels fresh to me after all this time.

The best part of making things locally is knowing the people who make them. I learn something from every one of my production partners — their hands-on knowledge has made our clothes better more times than I can count. Getting to work alongside people this skilled and this dedicated, regularly, is not something I take for granted. For what I can't source here, most of the fabric, sadly, I lean on relationships I've built over years with mills and fabric people who care about the same things I do.

There's also the simple fact that keeping production here keeps the work here. It means investing in my local economy instead of routing around it, and it means a little bit of a skilled trade, garment manufacturing, stays alive in a country that's mostly let it go. That's bigger than clothing. It's institutional knowledge, and once it's gone from a place, it's genuinely hard to get back.

And it means I can stand behind how a piece was made, fair wages, safe conditions, people treated well. Because I am part of it happening every day.

None of this is a decision I get to make alone, though. You're the one who decides what you buy and why, and that adds up to something real, for this industry and plenty of others. In a moment where a lot feels out of anyone's hands, it's worth remembering that this part isn't. It's worth thinking about where what you own came from, how it was made, and what happens to it once you're done with it.