Someone asked Rose, who answers our customer service emails, why we don’t do the Van Doren 6 strap suspender belt in peach. It’s a good question so I thought I’d explain.
The fabric and trims we use for the Van Doren range used to be things we could find on end of line or clearance, because making things in the UK is expensive as compared to making them in countries with lower wages, so we tried to keep the cost of the components down.
But we make quite a few of them, so a while back we switched to a really nice fabric often used for swimwear or dancewear (both require plenty of stretch, a nice feel and good durability). This means we can keep things as consistent as possible, within the variations of different batches of fabric and dying.
The fabric we use is always available in black, but other colours change each season, so we would never be able to do a consistent peach unless we were prepared to order it especially. I’ve never asked how many metres we’d have to have or how much it would cost because I fear I would pass out on the spot.
Even to do one of the seasonal colours, we have to order a whole roll, unless we luck out and someone else has bought a colour we want and didn’t use the whole roll (or, as shown above, we find some powernet in a handy colour). An entire roll is a serious investment of cash into fabric which we then have to store and not recoup our costs on for a while, and we have to be absolutely sure we can sell LOTS in the colour, because you make a huge amount of lingerie from one whole roll of dancewear fabric. Thus far we’ve never had the cash or confidence to do this!
Even if we do get the fabric in peach, we also have to have peach trims, hooks and eyes, elastics etc. Exactly the same thing applies to them as to the fabrics – we can dye small quantities, but it’s expensive and unreliable, or we can invest in a large amount, and hope like hell we can sell enough of it fast enough and long enough to make it worthwhile.
So this is why we just make black; we also can’t get ivory fabric easily so that’s why there are ivory powernet garments but not the opaque garments.
What Katie Did do a deep, 6 strap peach belt though so you could always head that way!
Hopefully this also explains to you why my job is actually quite boring, and why almost all fashion and lingerie degrees are not actually terribly helpful in explaining how things get from inspiration to production. No, you do not start from your amazing creative idea, you start from what you can actually do!
Keep your eyes peeled in the New Year as we’re revamping the Van Doren and Vargas lines; in the meantime, we’re restocking on them this week in the run up to last minute Christmas buying – the 6 strap should be around by the end of today.
