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Residents seriously made clothes with an apparel company vol.2

2024-03-28

The "Loungewear Project" was started by the apparel company TARROW TOKYO and a team of Social Apartment tenants, with the aim of developing and selling products from the unique perspective of Social Apartment tenants. This column, published on TARROW TOKYO's website, will be divided into several parts.

< Previously >

A Resident's Serious Story of Making Clothes with an Apparel Company vol.1 [Column].

From this issue, we will start talking about making clothes. We have been working on the concept for about 2 months until we reached this phase. During that period, the Kamikitazawa team members made time for this project almost every day after work.

Conducting the Survey Questionnaire

In cooperation with Global Agents, the operator of Social Apartment, Taro staff and the Kamikitazawa team conducted a survey of all properties to see if the concept developed by Taro staff and the Kamikitazawa team resonated well with people and if there were any points that were overlooked. (*The word "loungewear" is used in the survey to make the image easier to understand). The survey was conducted with the cooperation of Global Agents, the apartment management company.

The contents of the survey were largely as follows

What price range do you feel comfortable buying?
What do you look for in loungewear?

*Personal interview questionnaires were also conducted with several individual residents.

The results of this survey were used to determine pricing, fabric selection, and design decisions. Thank you for your cooperation and valuable time and input.

Silhouette Design / Fabric Decisions

1) Silhouette design

We brushed up the silhouette design, reflecting what the Kamikitazawa team had in mind as their image and the survey data.

The following is what we focused on (comments from the Kamikitazawa team)

Kamikitazawa team Our project theme was "to create clothes that people within a 3-meter radius would want to wear," so we listened to the real voices of people close to us and tried to make the most of them in creating the clothes. We really spend a lot of time and try to pack in a variety of particulars, among which we are particularly particular about "silhouette" and "durability.

Kamikitazawa Team As for the silhouette, we are thinking about making the S size more comfortable for women to wear, while basing it on a looser silhouette. We want to create a silhouette that many people will want to wear! Ideally, we want to create a silhouette that makes people think, "I want to wear this!

Kamikitazawa Team Next is durability. The first is that in our survey questionnaires, many people were concerned about wrinkling and shrinkage caused by washing. Since the actual number of times they are washed will increase if they are worn a lot, we were very conscious when selecting the fabrics. Second, we respected TARROW TOKYO's important idea. Secondly, I respected the idea that TARROW TOKYO places great importance on. Therefore, we also thought from the beginning that the durability of the fabrics could not be overlooked.

(2) Fabric selection

We looked for fabric swatches and samples that were close to our image. We had to choose fabrics that were comfortable to wear, washable, and highly visible, so it took us quite some time to make a final decision. We actually ordered samples and narrowed it down to two final candidates. After this point, we finally proceeded to sample production.

Completion of 1ST sample

About 4 months have passed since the project started. Here is the finished sample after a long period of time.

It is a little hard to see in the picture, but both are made of knit material, and one is made of high-twisted yarn*.

*Highly twisted yarn: Yarn with higher twist strength. It is wrinkle-resistant and durable.

The sample with high-twist yarn fabric has a moderate bounce, and the "high visibility" part seems to be no problem. The other had a soft texture with a knit-like feel, and the "comfort" feel was excellent. Taro was relieved that both samples turned out better than expected, but was a little nervous when actually showing them to the people at Neighbors Kamikitazawa.

Here are some comments from the Kamikitazawa team

When the Kamikitazawa team received the samples, all of the team members were excited to see them take shape, as it was the first time for all of them to produce clothing from scratch. We were so excited to see the sample take shape that we were all saying, "Let's open it now! After opening the package, we immediately tried on the garments and asked our housemates at Neighbors Kamikitazawa to wear them and give us their honest feedback on how they felt about the garments.

The Kamikitazawa team was surprised at the high degree of perfection in both cases. Especially the fabric! It was very solid and of high quality. To be honest, we had a great deal of anxiety about the fabric, as it was quite difficult to reconcile the two before creating the sample, but I thought that the brand was indeed from OEM (laugh). We discussed the points to be improved for the next 2nd sample.

Although it was only the 1st sample, both sides felt very uplifted by the quality of the finished product. Now, we will work on fine-tuning, color selection, and finalizing which fabric (high-twisted yarn or non-high-twisted yarn) to use for the commercialization of the product. We hope you can look forward to seeing what the final product will look like.

In addition, wewill be exhibiting atSocial Good Lounge Tsunaguichi!

The first sample of this project was exhibited at "Tsunaguichi" held on June 18 (Sun.). This exhibition was completely voluntary by the Kamikitazawa team, and thanks to the exhibition, we were able to directly listen to the opinions of visitors and find new points to revise that we could not have noticed on our own.

In this issue, we reported on the background of the project's inception and the start of the project. In the next issue, we will introduce sample production.

TARROW×SOCIAL APARTMENT】LOUNGE WEAR】Official page

Neighbors Kamikitazawa Property page