Material world As dusty sewing machines are fired up, local textile sellers are experiencing a business boom By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2020 (1670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Inside Marshall Fabrics, a 40,000-sq.-ft. textile mecca on Berry Street, there are six employees, and there are five phones: three landlines and two cellular devices. Once the lines open at 10 a.m., the ringing begins, and lately, it never truly ends.

The brrring-brrrings started picking up on April 6, almost as soon as the following words left Dr. Brent Roussin’s mouth: “If you choose to wear a non-medical mask, if you go out in the public, you may be protecting others.”

That comment served as somewhat of a wake-up call for dormant seamstresses and schmatta makers, as well as people who’d never before considered taking up the fine art of sewing before the pandemic struck. Very quickly, Beth Syrnyk, the manager at Marshall Fabrics, knew her staff were in for a wild few weeks, even if the store was closed to the public.

“(The demand) is non-stop,” said Syrnyk, a businessperson who practises what she preaches: on Tuesday, she wore an outfit she’d made entirely by herself — red tights with a ponte knit, and a printed chemise with red and blue flowers. In the week since Dr. Roussin’s pro-mask proclamation, Marshall Fabrics has filled over 1,300 orders for fabric, elastics, and thread, and the calls keep coming.

One woman on the docket Tuesday wanted a metre-and-a-half of four different prints, “something a little more masculine.” Another wanted 12 half-metre cuts, an order of cotton satine lining, and 30 metres of fabric. Both customers were first-time buyers. Five-hundred orders and callers are in the backlog.

Inside the store, customers normally peruse the stock themselves: they might want a paw-print pattern, or a solid navy blue. Employees guide them around the store, conduct the sales, grab samples. Now, nobody can come in but the employees, so their responsibilities have been appropriately altered and hemmed.

A woman named Kathy is the first contact over the phone: she’s the one taking names. Jillian takes orders and later returns calls. She asks questions like, “Is it for you?” “Is it for kids?” or “Do they like dinosaurs?” Sahra, Aaron and Darnell fill the orders as they work their way through the sheets, and Selam is at the till. A once simple purchase has become a well-choreographed routine.

“They phone, the name goes on the list. We call back, we take their order. We get it picked. We send it to the cashier. The cashier rings them through. She gives them a secret password so we don’t hand their parcel to the wrong person,” says Synryk, sounding like a double-agent.

“They phone us when they’re here, give us the password over the phone. We take the parcel out, we put it in a plastic bin outside, they come to the steps, we confirm who they are, and they pick it up.” The bin is disinfected. The process repeats.

“It’s sort of like a game of chess,” says Selam Hussen, the cashier-supervisor who herself has been wearing a mask covered with avocados.

Across the city, other distributors have been working to strategize their own moves since the pandemic arrived and business shutdowns began.

At Economy Textile, 70 per cent of sales have been for materials related to mask-making, says Maria Diebold, the company’s bookkeeper. About 20 per cent have been for disposable gloves, of which Economy has implemented a three-box maximum order per customer.

On King Edward Street, KTR Sewing Centre, which sells fabric and over 50 models of domestic sewing, surging, and embroidery machines, has been doing historically brisk business through phone orders, says Rob Truthwaite, who co-owns the centre with his wife Kelly.

“I’ll need to grab my calculator,” he said. “Six… two… 150… 350 divided by 12… times four…,” he muttered under his breath.

“Normally we sell about 175 yards of fabric per week,” he said. “In the last seven days, we’ve done 700 yards.”

The surge has been encouraging to Truthwaite, who sees the textile industry playing a key role in the public health response to COVID-19.

However, the satisfaction isn’t total: before the demand skyrocketed, KTR — a small mom-and-pop shop— laid off two employees due to cancelled classes and sales decreases. A week later, the call for masks amplified, and fortunes reversed.

Truthwaite said he has a stockpile of some 2,000 bolts of fabric, which is about 20,000 to 22,000 yards. His suppliers, concentrated in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, have suspended shipping. If the 700 yard-per-week pace continues, which Truthwaite doesn’t expect, KTR will have enough material to carry them through to November.

“For now, we have to wait it out,” he said Tuesday morning..

“But I hope there aren’t too many more questions,” he added as the business day began. “I’ve got to get back to work, so I’ll have to cut this a bit short.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman covers a little bit of everything for the Free Press.

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