Order Update Thread

Are you sure it was LD that made a recharge? Or is it that your CC reinstated the original charge for what ever reason (not enough info, etc)?

I Hate having to scroll past that Black Watch shirt.

Assuming it's them again, the how it works page is particularly infuriating.

I liked the part about meticulous oversight -- given that Lawless sold the shit out of things without realizing the amount of fabric it takes to make a pair of jeans. A mistake that they corrected on their "other manufacturers are ripping you off" graphic. They're still estimating that it takes about an hour for one person to make a pair of jeans, or if they're paying minimum wage in LA maybe they can take one person less than two hours including cutting and sewing. This estimate alone stinks of Lawless, their deletion of my comment moreso. I'm not going to ask any of the other guys making jeans here how appropriate that estimate is, but I'm guessing someone making $9 an hour would take longer than two hours to make a pair of jeans from fabric roll to finished garment, especially if they have to handle the prep and packaging for shipment. This also doesn't include the cost of boba runs and managers conducting the meticulous oversight. If you account for all that, they're estimating about 20 minutes per pair.

A fair estimate for their jeans is $50. Which is still a decent profit at $64/pair, but not if you account for management salaries, shipping costs, and mistakes in manufacture. I've said it before, I think Gustin is doing this about as cheap as one can, and I know based on his own admission that Ciano is struggling with the price-point set, and they have a much lower footprint than Free Riders if for no other reason than being in LA and paying for water, electricity, and at least two managers. They can donate the profits pretty easily because there are none, but I don't imagine they can calculate that much better than their own costs. From my rudimentary understanding of these things (I'm trying to learn), they should be charging at least $74 for the 13.5oz Cone Denim used as an example in their cost graphic, and if they want to be providing donations, it should probably be closer to $100 if for no other reason than to have something set aside to pay their accountant to sort this out come April, and the resulting tax bill. By the way, they're charging $64 for "17oz Cone Denim" which looks an awful lot like the 16.25oz Cone Red Line/Heavy American from Gustin (does Cone even make a 17oz?). 

Way late to this party. New to this forum - it's a great source of information on all legit brands and for keeping track on this BS. I had placed an order for two of their shirts in January and suspected something was up once the months passed by and I wasn't seeing anything more than excuses. I don't normally mess with Kickstarter brands, but I guess businesses have to start somewhere. My credit card company pushed back on me about the charge backs, but I was able to get them through. I'm concerned Lawless may try and get the charges reapplied after reading the comments above.

After reading through these threads since I've joined, I think the attorney general route is a good one. I also like the comment someone here wrote about alerting the media. 

Thanks for challenging this guy. Lawless shouldn't be able to walk away from this untouched. 

Welcome. Glad to have more people here in the forum, sorry it has to be folks following up on being defrauded. Make your voice heard, it's the only way to create change.

I feel like I'm encouraging people to vote. 

This article about Red Cloud says eight people can make 30 pair a day: www.onthehonorroll.com/沈阳制造-made-in-shenyang/

Given that Red Cloud is a reputable brand with a good product, I'd take that as a reliable rule of thumb for what it takes to make a solid pair of jeans.

Should I use the Freeridersco Chat With Us and ask for Roman or Jameson?

definitely looking like freeridersco is lawless, with new photos and a well designed site. so they're off to a good start in that regard

30/8=3.75 (each person is responsible for the equivalent of 3.75 pairs per day)
8/3.75=2.13 (number of hours spent on each pair assuming an eight hour shift)

Am I mathsing right? 

Yeah I said I was leaving this thread....I know....anyway

Think about the scale of the business as well. If you've never had to analyze operations for a shop of any kind, you'd be amazed at the complexity of even the most "simple" manufacturing operation.

A really small business (LD and their spawn)...You have a pattern and people are cutting out denim pieces by hand, moving rolls of denim around, cutting 9 pairs from one roll, 3 from another etc...manually tracking things through the shop, sewing by hand, changing setups on their machines daily because there isn't a "left back pocket orange thread station". Oh wait, Jim didn't put the 15oz denim back we can't find it...where are the bobbins...they're supposed to be over there...A single station might do 20 different jobs and requires set up clean up etc between each job. At best, you're spending a lot more time on logistics than you are sewing anything. Then, lets say you mess up a few pairs in a non correctable way...you've lost hours of already expended labor, not minutes. Multiply that by 10 and you're looking at 75% of a 40 hour labor week lost and then you have to double that because you've got go repeat the work....and you push out other work to do it. Oh and your vintage chain stitch machine just broke and won't be up for 48 hours and the thread guy called, they're backordered for a week etc etc etc.. Things go from linearly bad to exponentially bad immediately, pure overhead expense nightmare in addition to the normal overhead you already cut as close to the bone as possible assuming endless error free days. Even if you're awesome at planning and organization, it's a huge challenge.

The difference between a small shop and a big manufacturing facility is staggering, you can lose days in a small shop compared to minutes in a "factory" making the exact same product.

I don't post this as an argument for or against anyone's comments, just take the time, if you really want to get a feel for this, and do a paper exercise. It will blow your mind. Brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen, making stuff and being profitable is hard. I don't want to get into the "i've done this and that so I know" thing but I will say that I've lived both textile manufacturing and engineering at different times in my nerd career and that shit is not easy. The idea of a shop with 15-20 employees working at anywhere near even a semi automated medium sized outfit is just impossible. Won't happen. The transparency examples that get thrown around by these companies are so simplified that they're downright insulting to anyone who's been in the middle of any sort of operations management. They're the business equivalent of those motivational posters from the 90's or inspirational memes..."No one can stop you if you never give up".....wtf does that actually mean other than not a damn thing? To get even a rough thumbnail estimate, you need pages of real analysis of the most seemingly trivial steps. 

Not saying small is bad, just get rid of the illusion that small can be good and cheap. Not here in the USA anyway unless your staff works for free and your stuff is always perfect.