Long Distance Production
The first time we went to Bali was the winter after our first season on Ibiza in 2016. We wanted to try and make a small production for our brand Nousa (at the time called Tribe of Dreamers), after I’ve spent many summer days sewing the clothing we were selling in our shop.
We had a contact from someone who already produced in Bali and we thought it could be nice to make a working holiday out of it. What we didn’t know was that we would meet a very important person for our working and personal life and that we would fall into a crazy love relationship with yet another island.
I’m not sure what it is that attracts us like a magnet to contradictory places, where everybody travels to, thinking they’ll find a little piece of heaven to switch their brains off and just enjoy, and we end up diving deep into ourselves, our doubts, our hopes and dreams and get out on the other side with our hair (the one of us who has any) all messed up, our strong points in life upside down and not a full day of relaxation.
Bali is green and humid, dustily noisy and deeply silent, so silent you can hear the echo of your thoughts only by looking into the jungle from the balcony of your bedroom. It’s scary to hear yourself so loudly, but those shivers are what keeps us alive, aren’t they? Bali is fun and colorful, rough and lush, a tropical fairytale where in a few minutes you get from infinite open rice fields to the coolest contemporary and unimaginable restaurant.
A typical day of work starts with a pancake and fresh fruit for breakfast and a morning sweating in traffic with your rented scooter, praying to all Gods, European and Balinese, that you’ll survive until the next stoplight (that is if you’re not used to Balinese driving).
The first step is fabric hunting: there are so many suppliers, from dusty 3 storey warehouses to sleek boutique like shops, where you can stop to enjoy the air-con, a precious bottle of cold water and a sweet pick-me-up snack. From small and narrow alleys around traditional markets to sumptuous treasure hunt buildings. A quick late lunch at the local warung, where you can eat the best meal for 1,50€ and then off to pack your scooter with a ton of fabrics, where you might be ending up sitting on.
Late afternoons in rainy season are for pouring rain, so you just cross your fingers you get back home before that, to take out all the samples you collected, discuss pros and cons of each and every one of them, combine them, imagine them as a pair of trousers or a dress, calculate if you can actually use it for production with some profit margin or if you just really really want it because you fell in love, forgetting that this is supposed to be your job…
Then to clear our minds we would go for a walk on the beach and look at those breathtaking sunsets, where it seems like the sun is just exploding and blushing into the sea.
And then there is Anggi, our Balinese angel, so smart and patient, she manages our production for the 5th year now and we don’t know how we’ve been so lucky to find her. We are control freaks and perfectionists, we just put our heart and soul into our collections and it is difficult to separate business from passion. Anggi understands that and helps us finding just the right fabric, with the right thickness, just the best cut, with the right seam. She surprisingly understand my manic pattern design with all the marks and changes, and is easing us into the Balinese way of doing things, which is actually not too different from the Ibizan way of things. No hurry, everything at the right time, nothing is a problem and no-one is to blame. And tomorrow is another day.
On weekends we would have a one and a half day holiday, traveling around the island, walking down hundreds of steps to beaches under steep cliffs, visiting one of many fascinating temples, driving between palm trees and rice fields (and getting stuck in the mud now and then, but that’s life). We would dress up in our nicest flowy outfit and flip-flops and head out for the most delicious dinner in one of a thousand small little restaurants, all so beautiful and delicious.
Unfortunately we are not as free to travel right now and we are forced to do all the fabric hunting and sample testing through someone else’s eyes and through their phone cameras. It’s amazing what technology and trusted people can help to accomplish! We send drawings, emails, explanations, detailed measurements and descriptions, and even tutorial videos for special changes on a pattern and we receive back videos of how a fabric falls, moves, reacts, of its colour in different lights and compared to other fabrics, pictures of samples on different body types, of their details, pockets, inner seams and fastenings. It’s almost like being there, but without the smell of the palm trees and the views of the wild ocean.
