Transcription
Blue Lemon ABC pant: should these be your go-to pants? Let's take a look. I'm Joe, I've been in manufacturing for over a decade and I've overseen the production of millions of products all over the world. On this show, we take apart pieces from your favorite brands, see if the quality is there, and I'll let you know if it's worth your hard-earned money. This is Industry Secrets.
All right, we are back with another episode of Industry Secrets. Now, what you got for me this week? Check this out: Lululemon ABC pant. This is the Nike Tech Fleece of Finance Bros, Wall Street. Let's get some initial thoughts here. So this appears to be a kind of like a five-pocket denim kind of inspired design. You can tell with the rivets. What do they say about this? "Five-pocket jean reinvented." These slim pants are engineered to give you freedom of movement, all-day comfort, designed for everyday performance, and our WarpStream. So this tells me it's probably a warp knit fabric. Fabric is four-way stretch, quick-drying, probably wrinkle-resistant, with excellent shape retention, ABC technology.
So this one, that you have to be very cautious about with a lot of fashion brands. I think a lot of brands, especially after Lululemon, you know, branding your fabric is definitely an important way to differentiate yourself in the market. Something like "our ABC," so the anti-ball crushing technology uses an ergonomic gusset to remove tension from the crotch. They're—the technology they're talking about is this piece of fabric right here. And all they did was, instead of having a seam that goes front to back, which would make it stiff, is they put this gusset panel in. Because when it comes to fabric, fabric stretches less in the up and down direction, so the length direction compared to the across-grain direction, you'll see there's a lot more stretch in this. So by turning the fabric and putting a little panel fabric here, it gives more stretch near the crotch. Be very mindful when it comes to branded technologies within clothing because that technology they're talking about there is just a piece of fabric that turns sideways. Hidden zipper pocket. I'm sure we'll come across it at some point. Lululemon is really known for their kind of uh, little tiny little upgrades within their garments, where it's like the pocket in a pocket, or their leggings, they have a little hidden pocket in the waistband. It's a nice little touch to just further improve the garment in terms of attention to detail. Flip-up cuffs reveal reflective detail. Okay, that's cool. So on the inside of the leg panel, they have a reflective stripe. I assume this is for people that are commuting in town and they're biking and cycling, so they can roll up their cuffs so their cuffs don't get dirty, and then they have this reflective detail. And this is a nice way to finish the side of the leg, too. The way they've finished this is not very typical for pants. They've double-turned back, so they took the fabric, they've turned it here, flipped it again, sewn it, so the fabric, the raw fabric edge is actually not exposed to fraying. This is not a very common thing. You'll see it's definitely an additional cost to that, but we'll get back to that. What else do we have here? The little decorative panel here. This panel doesn't really add much; it's just purely decorative, but gives a little visual interest to the back of the pant, especially when you have like this particular color and such a long silhouette. By not having this, it can kind of get very boring on the back panel. What else we have here? The front pocket, nice deep pockets in the front. The rivets obviously carried over from denim-inspired design. This—this fairly deep—at some point used to be known as the coin chapstick pocket, but given the width of this, I would assume this has become the Zin pocket now. We have a woven fabric inside for the pocket liners, nice thin material. Let me cut off the tank tag here. I think these were—how much were these again? $128 US. It's definitely up there for pants. Designed Vancouver, obviously made in Indonesia. 53% ElastamulTeaster, 47% polyester. ElastamulTeaster, from my understanding what it is, is a bi-component yarn, and it takes two different types of polyester, two different sizes, and it kind of fuses it—think like a—it's like a snowman, and then that shape. And by the combination of the two different polyesters, gives it inherent stretch in the yarn, and then uh, I believe if this is from Lycra brand, this is their T400, it's wrapped in cotton to give it additional comfort and give it the ability to be dyed really well. And then this is also 47% polyester. Given the consistent color throughout, I don't know if this is cotton wrap, just because polyesters and cotton actually use different types of dyes, so you wouldn't be able to get a very consistent solid color if there was cotton present. So in reality, or with 53% ElastamulTeaster, 47% polyester, it's pretty much 100% polyester. We have a—we have this grosgrain piping detail here around the pant. This particular detailing with the piping you'll see carried along through a lot of classical men's clothing where you'll see it—a lot of polos, you'll see it in dress pants—suits sometimes have this detail and just provides a little bit of contrast. And then I can see here we have the Lululemon branding on the back, on the inside again with the grosgrain, probably same tape as over here, and it's—this is done to provide additional strength to the back of the button because if you did it just on the fabric, you might just rip it right through. For the zipper here, we have a YKK zipper with a locking tab. I just make sure it doesn't stand up, so when you lock it down, position it, it'll flick there, and you lock it up, it'll stay there. You'll see here with the belt loops, typically the belt loops are going to be longer than the waistband on most pants, and what they do is because the body fabric is not going to be thick enough to hold the bar tack for the belt loop, a lot of brands what they do is they actually just hang like twill tape almost here from the waistband downwards, so it gives that fabric for it to be sewn onto, but that adds a lot of additional bulk on the waistbands. What they've actually done here is they've bonded another panel piece here to provide that support, which is an additional step in the manufacturing process, and you're going to have to have a factory that has the equipment to do this. Obviously, if you're Lululemon, you can get a factory to buy whatever equipment, but that's a very nice attention to detail there. The zipper itself, it's what's called DTM, so you'll see the taping for the zipper matches the body fabric, same kind of locking tab. For the back pocket, also YKK size three. All the pockets are reinforced with bar tacks to strengthen the seams. This is an interesting detail here for the—for the fly, they didn't stitch it across, so it's kind of floating there, so that's just an interesting design element. I guess it kind of cleans up the—the static, too. Okay, so that is the outside. We have the Lululemon branding here on the waistband, WarpStream again. WarpStream is just their name for their warp knit fabric. Warp knitting is a different type of knitting. Let's take a look at the inside here. Very clean finishing on—on this pant. So typically what you'll see for a lot of pants is they will use an overlock seam; that's what this is, but what they've done here is they've actually flipped it down, top-stitched it, double-needle top stitch, one, two, and what that does is it keeps it nice and flat, so on the inside of the garment you're not going to have these kind of flaps. And that's what they've done here is they really cleaned it up on the inside to make sure that—see, it stays a very slim profile on the inside, on the outside. And here they've done what's called the double turn back. Let me actually cut this open here so you can see. So you see the seam here, what they did is they have this much excess fabric, and this is going to be a raw edge that could be prone to fraying, and a lot of brands would just leave the raw edge exposed or—or encapsulate within a—a serge or overlock seam, and what they did is they had enough seam allowance for it to be turned back once, twice, and then top-stitched, so that raw edge now is fully encapsulated within the—the seam, and there's not going to be any chance of that kind of unframing or unraveling. One, that increases fabric consumption; two, that's also additional work, so it's really nice to see here. Pocket bags nice and light, it's a woven material because you don't want a lot of stretch in your pocket bags, 'cause then as you're walking, things will start kind of bouncing up and down. You know, really looking at this—at least this particular unit—and this is the reason why we buy all of our stuff, so it's a random sampling of what's actually being offered to the public, there's like no visible workmanship defects on this pant. I think that they're probably running this program at a factory for quite some time; that factory has really tightened up all their SOPs, and the—the workers have been running this program for a really long time as well, so all the workers know how to construct this garment. There's like very—there's no visual flaws; the attention to detail is really good. I like how there's actually an additional small pocket on the left pocket as well, and it's a mesh pocket, so that's an additional fabric piece that they had to bring in there. You know, overall, it might not be a pant for every single person out there. I think when it comes to Lululemon clothes, a lot of people find them a little boring, but in this particular pant, the workmanship's great, the fabric is—is quite nice. As a day-to-day pant, I think this pant's going to last you quite some time. So overall, what I'm seeing so far, while the design might be kind of boring, and I think a lot of people think of that when—when it comes to Lululemon, that the style is a little more tamed down, but I think that comes from a lot of its roots, you know, it's based in Vancouver, and it's more of a kind of outdoor, relaxed lifestyle, more laid-back. You're not going to get the kind of crazy design elements that you might get in a New York fashion house or a UK fashion house. So next, I'm going to actually cut this up; I'm going to show you all the panel pieces you need to make a garment like this, and I'll give you my final thoughts and give it a final score. But before I do, make sure you like, comment, and subscribe because we're going to do a lot more of these breakdowns in the future. All right, so let's start taking this apart. You see here, this is the interfacing to stiffen the fabric, and they also have another layer here in the middle, which is a woven. So you see here, this is the grosgrain tape on the inside; it's already pressed and folded back as well. So this is definitely a step in the manufacturing process where these tapes are basically cut to size, folded, pressed to maintain the shape there. So you see with the—using elements in here, this interfacing is meant to stiffen up the fabric; they've added an additional woven layer in the center to further stiffen it up so that this doesn't fold over and it always stays relatively straight compared to the—the body fabric, which is very elastic and flowing. What would happen is if you don't have that interfacing within the waistband and you just had the waist fabric itself, it might actually give too much stretch itself and it would sag on the wear, whereas if you have a stiff waistband like this—think of it as a kind of hard mounting point—you have this hard mounting point that's a circle that's now sitting on your waist that's going to be sitting above the largest part, which is going to be your hips, so that this hard mounting point is going to prevent the pants, one, from falling down, and it's also going to always sit in a very specific area to provide the proper drape of that garment. There's the waistband itself; then we have the back yoke here, or under the—the waistband, you have your back yoke here, and you see this is the regular fabric itself, and you see how much stretch there is in that, so you can imagine even if you were to double this up for the waistband, if you actually had this base fabric itself without that stiffening as a waistband, these pants just might slide down over time, depending on how much stuff people put in their pockets as well. Heard me mention bar tacks a few times now, and you'll see that this on the outside's a bar tack, and what a bar tack is again is to strengthen a seam. So you can actually see here, if I start pulling here, all these threads are from the bar tack, so what you're—you can see here with that bar tack, you're always going to put this in places that are going to have high stress, like the belt loops and everything, where by doing that you just have so much thread there, and the stitches per inch is so dense that it's going to always be stronger than the fabric itself, to always reinforce that seam, 'cause what you don't want whenever you're making a garment is if you don't have a bar tack and you only have, let's say, a single needle there, you get this pulled at any point, it's just going to rip that thread and it's going to come loose. There is the front zipper, which is DTM, and this right here is their ABC technology again. It's just a gusset panel. You'll see here the stretch in this direction again is not going to be that great, but the stretch in this direction is going to be quite a lot. So that seam that's on the center back seam from your glutes, which is always going to be a stiffer part of the fabric attached to the front, by having this gusset panel, it provides a lot of relief, so it provides that anti-ball crushing technology. In women's pants and women's leggings, you're going to see this a lot as well, having a long gusset, and what that does is it actually prevents camel toe. So same kind of concept, same technology, but let's take a look at the rest of the pants. Here's the main fabric, here's the bar tack, here's the pocket bag. If I pull on this, you're going to see that the bar tack is so strong it just rips out of the main body fabric. So if you're a brand designing products and you really want to make products that do last, think of adding bar tacks in areas of very high stretch, you know, near pocket edges, near side seams, near gusset panels. Having bar tacks, especially in women's leggings, when they're pulling up their leggings and a lot of women's like to hike it up their—their butt crack, and what you're doing is you're reinforcing those seams to prevent that seam from eventually ripping and breaking over time. So you see here this is going to be the left pocket bag; we have the main body fabric; we also have the woven material on the back, that way when you're putting your hand in your pocket you still feel the same fabric, there's not like a disconnection when you're putting your hand in your pocket, but you still get the stiffness of the woven material so the pocket bag doesn't drape again, 'cause this material is so slinky. You see here, if I grab both materials and I pull, very minimal stretch; if I just pull on the fabric itself, you're going to get a lot more slinking, which is—you know—which will cause stuff in your pockets to bounce around. But there's the front left pocket; here is your left leg panel. Yeah, like even for the back pocket, they lined it with the woven material so that all pockets perform the same way. It's—it's very clean in here. A lot of times you'll see on pants, because the way pockets are finished, that you'll get a lot of the raw edges in there, but the way they finish the pocket, they turned it back, and then they have this pocket bag liner so that the inside the pocket is very clean. We'll show you some clips here of like pockets that I think a lot of brands, when they're first starting out without the technical expertise, there's always going to be things in manufacturing called A surfaces and B surfaces. A surfaces are things that you always see and the customers interact with; B surfaces are surfaces that customers will rarely see. So think of like a car; all the interior of a car are going to be A surfaces, but if you rip off a panel, what's underneath is going to be a B surface. When you look at like hypercars, all surfaces are A surfaces. When you look at this, the inside of the pocket bag is so clean, they've went through the attention to detail to finish the inside of the pocket bag to have it that clean. There's no B surface here. The technical team who—who made this pant and who is monitoring the production of this pant really knows what they're doing because—is this necessary for most people? No. Or most people don't even notice this. I guarantee you 99% of people who will buy these pants are not even going to notice this, but the brand took the time to do it properly. That's quite impressive. So that's the back panel; that's the back left leg panel, with back—front leg panel on the left, as well as the reflective. This is a carbon black reflective; actually this might be holographic. Yeah, it's—again, it's a nice attention to detail. They've seen that their com—their consumers are probably biking a lot to—to work because they live in the city; a lot of people are rolling up their pants so they're not getting dirty, so they added this design element in there. There's the front left leg panel; here's the front right leg panel. When they're designing this, they're going through the design exploration of—we know we're designing for probably an urban male who lives in a dense population such as New York or any city that has to go to the office, that has office attire that they need to wear, so they need to be wearing slacks, and they're probably commuting on cycles or bicycle or transit, so they're designing a product for that consumer and solving their needs rather than just putting something out there that's nice to look at. The back pocket here—let's see—again, same finishing detail, some loose thread here, but very minimal at this point. This is going to be for lock tracking as well as in-store tracking for their store associates. Let's see—it's inside this pocket; this would be a B surface; this would be a C surface. Let's see how clean this is—again, very clean. Even the zipper choice they chose for the back here with this tab, you actually can't move the zipper unless this tab has been raised. So this zipper is not going to migrate on its own, or this is not something Lululemon developed, but they went to YKK and they chose this locking tab zipper, but—but you can see the development process of choosing the right zipper for that application. You'll see here, flip it, and you're able to move it that way. You can put stuff in your back pocket and you know it's secured unless you're actually choosing to remove it yourself. Okay, like that's a deep pocket. I don't know if they designed it for a phone, but it clearly fits. I have an S22 Ultra; it's a fairly large phone, and it fits—that it's wider to accommodate men's hands. You're also—I guar—you're definitely able to fit a Zin container in there, back—or there. There's the right leg panel. So now that we have this taken apart for the most part, I'm going to show you all the trims and components you need to make this ABC pant from Lululemon. You're going to have the waistband, which is composed of the body fabric, which has been fused with interfacing as well as an additional layer to stiffen it within the center. You have your back yoke; you got your left leg panels here with the back pocket; all the pockets are lined with the woven polyester material, which is nice and thin and it's not going to provide stretch. You have your ABC gusset technology panel there; front fly; front fly panels; the zippers; you have your right leg panel here with the hidden pocket in the back pocket; you have the front pocket here with the additional interior pocket for Zin phones. One thing I actually really like as well is that on the tag they say "hidden zippered pocket," and they don't even actually say where, so you almost incentivize the consumer to either try and find it, which there's a little kind of like Treasure Chest kind of finding scenario that happens there, or they find out about it later on. And what will eventually happen is consumers are already wearing the pant, they like the pant, and then they find out about this additional detail later on, then all that does is just further reinforces what they think about the pant. So what they're trying to do here is they're not trying to make a quick buck with the ABC pant. ABC pant has become so popular because of the attention to detail, because of the workmanship, because what they're trying to do is they're trying to replace an entire category of pants. They want to get men out of slacks and get them into the ABC pants, and think of that as capturing an entire market segment. With everything I've seen here, with the material, with the attention to detail, to workmanship, with all the components, you can see every single component here is being sewn on by a different worker or a different line. There's a lot of pieces to make this pant. I would say there's a lot of trims and materials here; the build materials list is probably quite long; the manufacturing list is long. When you look at all these different panels, these are all cut separately, probably with a large cutter, but they're all sewn on by different workers; there's a lot of different stages to make these pants. I can see these costing $15 to $20 to make in Indonesia. So first up is going to be fabric. I like that they're using ElastamulTeaster; I like that it's warp knit; I like that it's very matte to the appearance and it provides a lot of stretch. I think, especially after COVID, people want very comfortable clothing. I know I had to go to a wedding a few weeks ago and I had to wear my wool suit, and I was so uncomfortable with the fabric, as it is as well. It's actually going to be very wrinkle-resistant, meaning that you're going to have to worry less about ironing your clothing, dry-cleaning your clothing. So with all that in mind, I'm going to have to give the fabric choice here a 9 out of 10. Workmanship on this pant, there is no visible flaws here, there is no B surfaces, there's no C surfaces; every surface on this pant is finished, and—and it's finished really well. I'm going to have to give the workmanship a 10 out of 10 on these pants. Next category is going to be attention to detail. As you can see, they went in on every single component, from the reflective on the inside of the cuff to the locking hidden zippers to the finished pockets on the inside. There is so much attention to detail to make this pant. This pant is not something that was designed once; there was definitely a lot of iterations to get to this point. Attention to detail, I'm going to give it a 10 out of 10. For value, these retailing at $128 US, it's probably $150 Canadian, it's definitely going to be on the higher end. I—I think that this is going to be a lot more of an investment piece for a lot of people, especially for a lot of men who may not traditionally spend this much money on clothing. I'm going to have to give it a value of a 7 out of 10. So that brings the final score of the ABC slim pant to 36 out of 40. This is something that if you are looking for a pant like this and it is in your price range, this is really well made, and I would say this is one you can definitely go for. So that is it for this episode of Industry Secrets. Let us know what other brands you want us to dive into and what other things that you want to learn about the fashion industry. Till next time, if you guys want to see more behind-the-scenes secrets on the fashion industry and learn more about how to create products and brands, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, and check out these videos.