part 2: much more than imagined
Thinking of scaling up the business and the future, I made a field trip to Izmir: third largest city in Turkey. I’ve got the intel from a scrap fabric retailer of the places I should visit. She was so sure I would not able to find something useful there because apparently the options are infinite.
She was right. We first went to a place called MuratTekstil. The road we took heading to the place was filled with scrap fabric shops. Scrap fabric fyi is remnants of fabric from textile producers that remain unused. Anyway then we arrived at the location: huge building, 3 floors, filled with fabric. Baskets, shelves, bags of it.
Not having unlimited time, tried our best to find the materials that are suitable for our designs. Putting boundaries for ourselves to not get out of our product range, it was tempting to just take anything that can be useful in the future. Much of the materials were the excess of ‘fast fashion’, polyester business and what i call ‘without character’. Yet, when you look carefully enough you find some gems. After meeting with a small scale home tailor at the place, we’d got another location we can visit. We went, and it was even better.
Finding materials for Oddly products will not be difficult. Not sure if this is a good news overall, since it's proving the abundance of excess textile in the world. All in all, so looking forward to create beautiful products with the new found treasures.