Robot machines make jeans......

[andewhall]

Hello chaps. Somehow stumbled into that denim debate website, think I was reading the ROY thread. Anyway I thought a good thread subject would be these crazy automated machines they have in large factories.

Mainly prompted by this comment on the DD website.

kiya Aug 05, 2010 at 2:14 pm #

On the J.Crew Dirty Laundry mini-site they state:

“Our back pockets are hand set..â€

Really? Because last i checked even $10 jeans at Wal-Mart have rear pockets which are “hand setâ€, i’ve never seen a factory in the world which has created a robot to do this step.

I would eat my hat if ten buck walmart jeans hip pockets were put on by hand. I dare say most large scale production of bar tacked back pockets are done on these machines. If you look on youtube you can see them in action, they fold the pocket, set it down and stitch around the outside, bartack across the top, stitch back up around the inside line and finish bartacking the other top corner.

There is no automatic machine that will produce a hidden rivet style hip pocket.

Juki pocket robot or automatic pocket setter.

[andewhall]

Here are a few more machines. Automatic belt loop machine.

And this machine cuts the long strips of belt loop into the desired length, once the belt loop strips have been made up on a coverseamer+feeder etc. You can see there is a counter mounted on the side, handy to know how many thousands of belt loops are going to be cut.

[stabliu]

as an engineer this doesnt surprise me in the slightest, almost every task involved in anything produced on a large scale has some sort of robot designed to do it.

[rnrswitch]

Just makes you wonder why anyone would still want to make these jeans by hand...

Ande, Of "high end" denim companies (a pair of jeans above the standard wal-mart, JC Penney's, Kohls, jeans) do a lot of them have this much mechanization during production. Like say seven or true religion. Are those jeans using this process. How many factories (percentage-wise) would you say make a pair of jeans this way. Is it hard to find factories that don't do it this way? You know, where most everything is done by hand?

Also, it would be interesting to know if there are factories where both are done. Some old lady sewing a back pocket right next to the machine doing the same thing... Kinda reminds me of Roger and Me, where GM put on display the factory line worker next to the machine that replaced him.

[stabliu]

I imagine, this is purely speculation mind you, that a good number of low end jeans are still made by hand as the production costs of human labor is still ridiculously low in many developing nations. If a pair of jeans was made in Bangladesh or some country like that I'd bet dollars to donuts they were mostly made by hand. If they were made in America and are produced by the thousands they're probably made by a mix of humans and robots, although the robots probably outnumber the people in those factories given how expensive American labor is.