A quick note as you shop. Because we deal in many small-lot fabrics and materials, many of our items are not listed on our website, but are available during our events. We list only those products that we can readily reproduce on the website. Feel free to find us at our events for the greatest selection.

Production Sewist

Shadowlands LLC DBA Odins Outfitters is always looking for additional help in creating our product. We are dedicated to providing the highest quality, small-business-made products for our customers. If you think that production sewing is something that you are interested in, please continue to read.

What you provide:

  1. You will be given a pattern and/or sample and fabric, and will use those to create a sample product which will need to be shipped to us for review. Consider it your audition.
  2. The needed machines. The preference is a sewing machine (heavy duty/industrial if possible), and a serger. If you do not have a serger but have the ability to make good-looking finished seams (French seams etc). Any additional machines (ie embroidery) are used at your discretion.
  3. You are responsible for all machine maintenance, we cannot reimburse for that.
  4. You are responsible for all thread and notions. You will need to build that into your per-piece price.
  5. The knowledge and experience. We focus on quality products and expect each of our sewists to provide the same dedication. If a product should fail due to quality issues, it will be sent back to the sewist for correction.
  6. You will need to provide secure and acceptable storage for some amount of fabric, as I try and buy slightly ahead of what I expect to need.
  7. Depending on your availability, you may be producing multiple products for us. We do try and keep it all the same fabric.
  8. Remnants. Depending on the size of the remnants, we may have you make one-off products for us. We strive to use all of the fabric and waste as little as possible. Anything smaller than 6X6 inches you may keep.

What we provide:

  1. We will provide fabric delivered to your address or location for you to produce products with.
  2. We will provide patterns for you to use in producing our garments. These patterns are considered Intellectual Property and remain the property of Shadowlands LLC. You are expected to neither share them with others, or use them yourself without explicit prior permission. If you are confident in copying a design, we may ship you a product and allow you to create your own copy of the pattern. We will still own the rights to that pattern though.
  3. We will cover all shipping costs to ship fabric to you, and to have products shipped to us by using a prepaid label we will generate through our shipping software. You will need to weigh the shipments and drop off at a local UPS (usually) or USPS facility(not so much). Should you no longer wish to produce for us, you will need to ship the fabric back to us (we will provide a prepaid label).
  4. Reorder lists, sent by email. These are what we call ‘Needs Lists’, and an example is attached.
  5. Clothing label tags for our brand to be sewn into the garments.
  6. Consider this a seasonal job. Workloads for various products can vary widely from month to month.

Payment:

  1. You are a 1099 contractor for Shadowlands, and not an employee. We will issue all appropriate 1099 documents for your tax purposes, and report it to the agencies as well. We will need your tax information (SSN, legal address etc) as you start to produce. If you produce less than $600, then a 1099 is not currently required.
  2. You will be paid an agreed-upon rate for each piece you produce. This is negotiated at the time of initial production of an item, so that you have timing and notions/thread estimates.
  3. You will be responsible for all taxes, including self-employment taxes etc.
  4. You will produce an itemized invoice including type of product, quantity, and piece-rate price.
  5. My preferred method of payment is Zelle, or if you’d like to submit an invoice via Square or Paypal, that is acceptable as well. You are responsible for any fees if using Square or Paypal. I hate checks, but if that’s the only thing available, we can work with it.

Conclusion:

I’ve tried to cover most topics, if you have questions, feel free to reach out. I know it’s a lot to digest, but getting things out in the open from the beginning is the perfect way to start communicating. We value our partners and if you have any suggestions, let us know.