Rachel Mills wears the colour of refusal with ease. The designer has turned down the standard model of wholesaling, as well as the seasonality that has governed conventional fashion.
“As a small brand, the production of our garments wasn’t prioritised by factories to meet the deadlines stores needed,” she says of the early days of her namesake label, which she founded after four years as a pattern-maker at Karen Walker. “Then stores would take months and months to pay for their order, leaving us in an unachievable cycle.”
Clothing prices needed to be high to take into account the wholesale markup and cover any unsold stock, “which made us just another inaccessible brand only achievable for a small portion of customers. It didn’t sit right for me and I knew something needed to change if I wanted to continue, whether that was with my own brand, or working for other brands.”
Rachel found a solution in The Pattern Table, previously called Figaro, which she acquired in 2019. Its history as a sportswear and uniform manufacturer, with a particular adeptness for product development, sampling and production, offered fertile ground, she thought, to see meaningful change for the Rachel Mills brand as well as others who sought The Pattern Table's manufacturing services in Mt Eden.
But it has been an arduous, tangled process over the past 18 months. “The ‘making’ side of the industry has been completely undervalued for the past 20 years,” she explains. “Product development is achievable for us, sampling is achievable for us, but in order to offer production, the industry is so far from where it needs to be in order to sustain itself.
“While development and sampling are charged at an hourly rate, production is charged at a piece rate that brands will try to heavily negotiate. We quickly learned that even if we agree on a piece rate that we believe is achievable, nine times out of 10 we still don’t win, for reasons outside of our control.”
The coterie of New Zealand brands Rachel manufactures clothing for is now comfortably small. They understand what she needs, and she in turn prioritises their needs for sampling, cutting and production runs with a workforce that has grown from two “and a half” machinists to six employees, plus herself and her mother, who co-owns the business.
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Advertise with NZME.As for her personal label, a new direction has also come into focus. “I began to think of our pieces not as fashion but as products. The idea of working as a brand following the traditional fashion structure just doesn’t work to anyone’s advantage at any point in the supply chain, especially if we want to live in a world with fair labour and valued resources. If we don’t have the skills or workforce to make the product, we have no product. I am now using the brand as a means to make our manufacturing business survive and thrive.”
Her label’s range, a tantalising mix of underwear, swimwear, wardrobe essentials and taut releases of made-to-order designs, suggests a kinship with its audience, its style often malleable to the gentle invitations for feedback Rachel sends out as she looks to streamline her ideas to meet our wants, our loves and our long sleeves. (The most popular offering, a skimpy little merino bralette, enwraps the full length of one’s arms in fetching comfort. It is the best of all possible uniforms because it is at once sultry and cosseting, but also because it affirms how important our choices are in what we wear.)
“Our biggest goal is to support and shape the garment industry, and it always has been,” says Rachel. “The products and vision we have created are just a vessel for actioning that.”
