At the two-story, 1,850-square-foot studio and shop, five employees in an upstairs studio are working away, creating hand-printed goods and sewing, while preparing to ship or sell them.
At Erin Flett Textiles & Home, a design firm in Gorham, customers are greeted by a colorful display of handmade hats, totes, clutches, pillows and accessories.
Behind the scenes at the two-story, 1,850-square-foot studio and shop, five employees in an upstairs studio are working away, creating hand-printed goods and sewing, while preparing to ship or sell them.
Erin Flett’s firm manufactures bags, pillows, wallpaper and other textiles using her hand-printed designs. PHOTO / TIM GREENWAY
The firm manufactures bags, pillows, wallpaper and other textiles using hand-printed designs.
It all starts with the creative force, Erin Flett, who hand draws each pattern by hand. Her designs are burned into sew “screens” at a local printer. The screens are then sent back to the store where Flett and her team begin the next process of actually creating the art, using a silkscreen process.
“We hand print each color, we dry it,” says Flett. “It’s very long — it’s a pretty laborious process — but we handprint each color, hang it in to dry, do another layer, let it dry and then we hand it off to the stitchers and they sew it up for us.”
The process takes around 45 minutes to make one piece.
The firm has 20 employees, who range from printers to stitchers, and also retail employees and an assistant.
The company works with Portland-based Strong Arm Bindery, which burns all of the screens. The bag inserts (or liners) come from Cuddledown in Yarmouth. All of the fabrics are sourced from the Carolinas and the zippers are made in California.
All of the textile goods are shipped globally through Faire, an online marketplace that uses machine learning to match local retailers with the brands and products, as well as on the Erin Flett website.
“So we’re really busy on wholesale,” says Flett. “We’re, I would say, 75% wholesale and then the rest is retail, obviously from here and then online.”
Flett has grown the company from an after-hours side hustle in the basement to a brand with a national network of wholesalers. Customers range from local boutiques to large retailers, such as L.L.Bean and Plow & Hearth, as well as trade customers, including hotels and interior designers.
