From Hobby to 'Family' Business

As the first few of her fourteen children came along, our founder Jane Anne McAllister found that store-bought clothes just didn’t have the quality she wanted for her babies. They also lacked the strength to endure being passed from one baby to the next and still look good, or even stay intact. So she sourced the best fabrics and began making her own baby clothes, lovingly embroidering each item by hand.

 

That was the start of Dimples. Founded in 1992, today, we still dedicate the same care and time that Jane gave to those first garments. We’re one of the few clothing companies that still manufacture in NZ, which lets us make sure each garment is of the highest quality. It also means that our manufacturing is inherently ethical – no unknown, offshore factories with little oversight of working conditions, wages or environmental issues.

 

So who makes our clothes? Our sewing machinists are part of our family, and all highly-skilled craftspeople. Karen has been with us for about seven years, putting her five decades of experience into every garment.

 

Meet Karen – a Dimples sewer

As a teenager, Karen finished school in December and reached school-leaving age in January, with dreams of training as a hairdresser. Her parents had other ideas – the hairdressing job didn’t start until mid-February, and they weren’t having her underfoot with nothing to do all that time.

“I had to do what my parents told me to. So they marched me into town and got me a sewing job, and that’s where I stayed. I started in the city – 50 years ago. Yes, it was a craft.”

 

‘Made-in-NZ’ – an endangered species

Back when Karen started her working life, a trained machinist could walk out of one job and into another almost immediately. That’s changed now.

Textile, leather, clothing and footwear manufacturing make up only 5% of New Zealand’s manufacturing sector, down from 8% in 2008.[1] The number of jobs filled by paid employees in the clothing and knitted-product manufacturing industry fell nearly 60 percent – from 9,550 to 4,120 between 1986 and 2012[2].

 

Taking pride in the quality

As a professional machinist, Karen says the shift towards international production might make clothes cheaper, but they’re often very poorly constructed. The difference, she says, is that she was trained to complete a whole garment rather than doing piece-work. International garment factories tend to have a group of people just sewing collars, cuffs or hems, for example.

“Everything’s done on the big stitch, no back-tacking. Within weeks the seams come apart.”

At Dimples, we can turn out high-quality garments because we employ craftspeople like Karen – they have very high standards and the skills to back it up.

Karen, in particular was known for her precision and was often used as a sample machinist.

“Everything had to be spot on. It was an example – then other sewers had to make it exactly like the sample.”

 

The Dimples family

The inclusive culture we foster at Dimples helps our engaged and committed staff produce their best work in a happy, supportive atmosphere. Karen truly thinks the Dimples ‘family’ are lovely people to work for.

“I’ve worked for a lot of people, and some of the other bosses were terrible. But Jane is just fantastic. When my grandkids were born, I got a beautiful gift for each baby. At Dimples, they care about you. They’re just nice people.”