Made for Me: Machines
Welcome back to Made for Me Monday! This week we’ll be taking you on a tour through our small factory to see our different machines and how each one plays an important role in piecing together our bags and accessories! Everything from the seatbelt, to the metal feet, and even each hang tag requires a different machine to create a fully completed seatbelt bag.
Over the past 25 years, we’ve gathered together quite the team of machines here at Harveys. All of our machines are industrial grade to make working with seatbelt as easy as possible. Our production team operates on an assembly line where the seatbelt moves through different machines depending on where it is in the production process. We’ll be talking about some of the machines that our seatbelt travels through on its way around our factory.
The seatbelt cutter is the first machine in our factory to be put to work on a new collection. This machine has been with the Harveys for so long it’s practically part of the family! We recently added a second machine to help keep up with our growing demand. Back in the day, Dana hand cut all the seatbelt for our bags. Since we’ve grown we now have the seatbelt cutter to help speed up production for Fernando. A roll of seatbelt is fed through the cutter, which trims it to specific lengths and drops it out the other side. This machine is very precise, which is good considering we need each length of seatbelt to be cut within a 32nd of an inch! Fernando inputs length and number of cuts depending on the demand for the collection and the machine takes it from there!
The laser cutter is a relatively new addition to our factory and is by far the largest machine! Back in the early days of Harveys, the linings were all cut by hand and this machine has allowed our team to cut and produce more and more over the years. If you’ve ever tuned into the Live at Five, the “table cloth” we use is actually a big piece of uncut lining! Our lining comes in large rolls that need to be cut down to fit precisely into each bag. This is all done by Tony, who feeds the big roll of lining into the laser cutter. The laser cutter is then programmed to cut the lining into the exact size for each silhouette, which in this case is the Medium Streamline Tote! Once the lining is cut it is stacked up until it’s ready to be sewn into each bag.
Before the lining is sewn in, each bag makes its way to what we call the foot machine. The Medium Streamline Tote has four feet on the bottom and in the past, our Crew stamped each foot on the bags by hand using mallets. Each foot is still secured on the bags one by one but now we have a machine that helps out! Over the years we’ve had to adapt the machines to fit our needs. Dana tinkered with the foot machine so that it can perfectly stamp our metal hardware onto the bottom of each bag.
The embroidery machine is the newest member of the Harveys factory team. Made for Me is the first project realized on this machine and our team was so excited to test it out! We knew this project would be a fun challenge since seatbelt can be difficult to sew through.
This machine allows us to embroider up to four bags at once, with each one taking between 45 minutes to an 1 hour and 15 minutes! The quickest one is 1920s embroidery as it only uses two colors and is the “simplest” design of the three. The 1980s version ended up being the most complex, with the most colors, and each one clocked in around 1 hour and 15 minutes.
We hope you enjoyed this tour of some of the machines in our small factory! Next week we’ll be taking a short break as our team begins piecing together the different elements and sewing them together into bags!
