Now we make pants.

Just when I thought things would be smooth sailing, my new contractor had a personal issue and took some time off. Again, I have pants to make, and nobody to make 'em.

I logged onto the Canadian Apparel Federation website and got a list of contractors here in Montreal (a few hundred) and just started down the list. It wasn't very fruitful, most companies were manufacturers or other small companies looking for contractors just like myself.

So I did what worked in the past. I pulled out the Yellow Pages and started calling entrepreneurs in the french section. (Entrepreneur, as I found is french for contractor). There were about 60 or 70 listings and I set appointments with about a dozen contractors. Now I have one primary contractor at the price I want, and he is proactive and has 31 years experience in the schmata (sic) business. I also now have four alternate contractors that can produce at slightly higher costs if the first contractor is busy.

Today - Monday, I planned out and started production.

This afternoon I also did some research to decide on what type of marketing and selling I will do once the pants are made. I remember Dexter saying that "it's easy to get people into your store" once I started getting far more orders than I could handle in the beginning. In light of this I am not going to spend too much time on marketing and promoting my garments, I am just going to open up a dialogue with my clients (potential). That may be through print materials, phone calls, seone.ca. Probably a combination of all three.