Automations and Human Talent Collide for the Best
When a brand, like Carhartt, comes to us and says they want the most advanced and efficient way to produce their product in the United States—we get to work identifying the most innovative technologies to make this happen. It’s been about a year in the making, but we’re finally ready to integrate the solutions alongside sewists.
Our goal is to showcase the most efficient and technologically advanced way to scale the domestic manufacturing for Carhartt beanies. Additionally, ISAIC’s long term strategy is to build the most advanced micro-worker-owned factories across the United States to focus on producing a specific product, whether that be hats, jerseys, swimwear, or insoles for shoes.
As we’ve researched the process of developing worker-owned factories, we learned that a 2-year incubation period yields the best results for long-term success. Thus, starting in January-- we will begin incubating the worker equity and development factory within the Institute on the A18 line (Carhartt beanies line) to de-risk the production line and ensure efficiency and profitability.
Ultimately, ISAIC intends to develop operators into masters of technology and become the beneficiaries of their work as owners. In the incubation period, sewists will learn lean manufacturing techniques, business management, and all other skills to successfully run a manufacturing business.
The Carhartt line will be the first micro-factory pilot; It will be fully optimized from start to finish. To start the process, we’ve been using our circular knit machine to produce the tubular fabric needed to create the hats, which will be passed to an operator who will feed the fabric to our custom Henderson Sewing automated knit turning system. The new automated machine is custom-made and is programmed to automatically cut and flip the hats—removing the labor-intensive menial tasks from the production line. The redistribution of manpower allows for a more efficient and enriching work environment.
From the automated knit turning system, material handlers will pass the fabric to sewists for construction. Once sewing operators finish producing the beanie, the Detect-It machine will use a camera to scan the hat and the notification system will flash green or red to indicate whether the product can move to the next stage of assembly. Detect-It is a software company with artificial intelligence capabilities that mimic the human eye. We teach the software to pinpoint defects so it can identify the flaws per unit at the source provided by the operator in the preliminary programming phase. We spent months feeding the machine thousands of hats to recognize defects, and now we will be inserting it into the production line to mitigate the risk of faulty hats moving forward.
The Detect-It solution will eliminate the end of line inspection to add value to our operators’ ability to focus on developing their craft and learning how to manage more advanced technologies. Lastly, we purchased an automatic tagging system that will reduce cycle time from 23 seconds to 3-5 seconds! Traditionally, operators have manually tagged the beanies with a tag gun.
Because we’re integrating these automations, we will be able to increase our production across the factory to redistribute talent and improve sewing accuracy. All of these technological investments will be documented to create instructions for wide-scale adoption in the soft goods manufacturing industry, where people and technology simultaneously advance the future of work.