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My cousin started a small business selling socks a few years back. I've been working with her to help improve the business and make things more efficient. One of the least efficient aspects currently is the hand application of crystals which adorn the socks. This is currently done in-home by herself with great expense in time and a large margin for error which is not at all scalable when she gets large orders in. I've come up with a few different ideas for how to speed up the process but I'm definitely not an expert in this area by any means. What i'm looking for is any of the following: 1) Someone who can engineer a better way to apply the crystals 2) Someone who can develop tooling or templating to make the process faster and idiot proof 3) Someone who can actually do the application of the crystals at a reasonable cost for a small business I don't really know where to start my search and so I was hoping someone here might know. I should also mention that ideally we want to keep this process in the US. We're currently in SoCal.
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# ¿ Oct 11, 2018 02:32 |
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# ¿ May 21, 2024 23:03 |
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Ivan Yurkinov posted:Sounds like you need a Bedazzler. Well, perhaps someone with extensive experience and tools for bedazzling. If we used an actual "bedazzler" tool to do the work it would be much slower than our current method.
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# ¿ Oct 11, 2018 19:40 |
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Stinky_Pete posted:Hey OP, try drawing the sock on a sheet of cardboard, and then draw where the gem would go so you can line it up I don't really want to give too much away about our current procedure, but I can tell you that we're beyond that. We apply about half of the crystals all at once, and the other half at one time as well. But sometimes they dont line up perfectly and we have to manually fix one here and there. But I'd like to be able to do it all with one pass, and basically am wondering who I could talk to that's smart enough to tell me/show me/actually do this for me.
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# ¿ Oct 13, 2018 19:56 |
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Elephanthead posted:So you are buying socks made in Southern Califonia? Currently the socks themselves are made in China. We are looking at finding a stateside manufacturer for the socks as well. But the rest of the assembly and packaging takes place locally, which technically makes them "Assembled in USA" as far as manufacturing goes. I don't really care if they are assembled local to SoCal or not, but prefer it to be done in the USA.
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# ¿ Oct 15, 2018 01:20 |
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Spokes posted:Did you mean a small margin of error Well, I would call it a large margin. Probably 30% of the socks have to be manually corrected a bit, which isn't very difficult, but it does add quite a bit of time to the process. Hence the need for a better process.
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# ¿ Oct 15, 2018 08:01 |
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Tim Thomas posted:without knowing a lot about what you are doing or what the patterns look like it what the beads look like or the geometry of the beads or the geometry of the socks or That's essentially what we are doing now, but its time consuming and not very efficient. I'm sure there's very expensive machinery to do this for you, so probably I just need to find someone who has that machinery and have them do it cheaper/better/faster. I just don't really know where to look for that.
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# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 00:01 |
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DaveSauce posted:Comedy option: sell the defects as "factory seconds" for 25% off, or put them up on Etsy as "hand made" and charge twice as much. Thank you. This is decent advice and I'll check this out.
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# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 00:21 |
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Raldikuk posted:From the information given it is hard to tell your best route. How much revenue are you guys currently pulling in? Is this all at home or do you lease a dedicated space too? We're currently in about 40 local retailers and have produced and sold close to 10k pairs so far. It's all done from home, currently not full-time. But its getting to the point where manufacturing is a bottleneck and taking away from us growing the business. An engineering consultant is probably what I'm looking for, I guess I just didn't know what they were called and where to look for them. I'll start here and see if it leads anywhere.
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# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 00:24 |
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Hotbod Handsomeface posted:Hi, congrats on the success so far. Those are both great leads. Might be exactly what I'm looking for. Even if they can't do the crystals we are looking to make the socks in the US as well so I'll look into this. Thank you!
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# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 23:47 |
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shame on an IGA posted:How are the gems physically attached to the sock? If you're using adhesives then a Pick & Place machine for assembling components to printed circuit boards can probably be adapted to your process with minimal modification. Its called "Hot Fix", which is just melted adhesive that is already applied to the gems when you buy them. It takes about 20 seconds @350 degrees to full adhere the stones, typically done with a heat press similar to what you would use for t-shirt iron-ons.
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# ¿ Jan 17, 2019 18:36 |
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DaveSauce posted:Sounds expensive. Pick and place is great for doing a variety of patterns, or custom patterns, but I would think it's overkill for this application. Plus programming new patterns would be a pain. This would also assume the gems come on a reel or some other sort of controlled feed, rather than loose product. Its not quite like that, but you're certainly on the right track. We've actually made a number of improvements to the process since I posted this thread, but ultimately the manufacturing part needs to be outsourced to someone with expensive machines. All of our patterns are the same, just a straight line with alternating sizes, very basic stuff. The basic process for us is applying transfer tape to a row of pre-aligned gems, stretching the sock over a plastic template and applying the transfer tape to the template to line the gems up on the sock. Stick the whole thing in the heat-press a few at a time and you're done. We can do about 12-15pr an hour with this method, but when you start getting orders for hundreds of pairs that are due in a few days its hard to keep up.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2019 01:27 |
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shame on an IGA posted:She's doing all that sequentially? Hire a couple more laborers and break the tasks down, I'd guess 1 person applying stones to tape, one lining up tape on the templated socks, and one working the press and stretching socks over the empty templates. You'll see big gains by parallellizing, any step in that process shouldn't be taking 120 seconds. Its usually done in batches. Enough to do a 6pr batch at a time. We recently found someone who can sell us the gems (at a reduced price) already fastened to transfer tape. Fixing the gems to the transfer tape was one of the most time consuming parts so this was a great boost to efficiency. The heat press part could only really be sped up by getting another heat press, but for now we can just get the next batch of socks ready for the heat press while the first batch is being pressed, so there isn't a lot of waiting or wasted time. She did recently hire a part-time employee to help with production so that's good, but ultimately outsourcing will be the way to go because right now too much time is being wasted making socks and not growing the business.
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# ¿ Jan 22, 2019 19:57 |
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# ¿ May 21, 2024 23:03 |
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shame on an IGA posted:Well since the thread's been necro'd, any updates? We've managed to speed up the manufacturing process significantly with the use of some improved templates and changes to the way they are done, but unfortunately my cousin is still a bit too stubborn to let go of the manufacturing herself and hasn't looked into outsourcing anything as of yet. Eventually she will run into scaling issues and not have a choice, but I'm trying to prepare her for that more gracefully. But otherwise, business is still growing and we've been focused more on marketing lately.
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# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 02:20 |