Mi Jong has designed and made clothing in New York City since 1982. She’s obsessed with detail – invisible seams, hand-drawn patterns, perfectly aligned prints, the weight of silk. Her brand is quiet – “if you know, you know” – but she has dressed many of the city’s powerful and influential women. 

Over the decades, Mi Jong resisted offshoring any part of her supply chain aside from a few specialty materials. Instead, she chose to build a vertically integrated model in the heart of the garment district. During the pandemic, Mi Jong survived by retooling her factory and building a coalition with three other factories in the neighborhood to manufacture over 700K hospital gowns. In the process, she demonstrated that high-volume production is possible within New York City.  Building on her learnings from making gowns, Mi Jong wants to expand the coalition and capacity of NYC to re-shore low-skill, high-volume products, starting with the humble t-shirt.

She believes that shorter timelines for brands, reduced inventory storage and waste, and higher quality are top of mind for brands and consumers, enough to be competitive with offshore manufacturers. She’s already hit the ground running, taking out loans to retrofit her space and buying a set of automated machines. The conversations she’s had with big brands have proven her hypothesis, and now she’s ready to launch her vision and expand it with other NYC-based manufacturers. If she succeeds, the Garment District could take back its rightful name, but with technology taking it into a new era.