Y o g a  T o g a  b y  M a r i e  P a y z a n t

          Up till this point, my knit experience was with hand knits that were cottage industry projects knit in the Indian Punjab. My first hand knit was 12-gauge cotton I designed in Delhi with a woman named Mrs. Dewan. Now I was introduced to that factory because my producer—who was later fired, but not soon enough for my liking, because he never delivered product on time and put rejects back in the shipping—wished to copy the Christmas ornaments Mrs. Dewan was producing for Putamayo, which was then in the garment rather than the music industry. Quickly forgetting about any ornaments,  Mrs. Dewan and I had an instant affinity only knitters can know. Now I hadn’t knit a sweater since seventh grade, when I knit two, and sold them off my back to a girl named Bev Cook at Forest Hills Junior High. I recalled the stockinette, the garter stitch, and employed them.

            As I excitedly gestured and described a cap-sleeve raglan shoulder pullover with a faux cardigan closure I wanted to make with her, she called her daughter, Praveen, who I would come to think of as representing everything that’s right about the Indian family work ethic. Praveen stayed up that first night, and many successive ones while I sampled product,  over many years until she married, to knit an entire sweater each evening.  She would arrive for ten-o’clock tea cooking with its milk and sugar at the factory with the chalky blue wall paint, pleasant, with dark circles under her eyes and her needles at the ready, a sweater stretched on the white laminate table in the room smelling of kerosene, with the knitters sitting on floors in circles assembling the pieces of sweaters for Putamayo, and later, when mine entered the pipeline, for A People United.

            After that first hand-knit sweater I dubbed "Praveen’s Mom" in Bisque hit the U.S. wholesale market it would keep the company afloat for an entire year with catalog sales to Coldwater Creek, until they copied it themselves one year and we had to write a cease and desist order. The button series evolved into a dozen hand carved themes, some of which sold to Soft Surroundings and more.

             I would visit Mrs. Dewan’s hometown in the Punjab to learn the delight of the villagers on the day we would come with the yarn I named "bisque" while being driven in a New Delhi white British car called Ambassador toward a market, lying sideways due to having diarrhea.

            The producer who shall go nameless, when I stayed with his family, had a habit of filling plastic bottles of water for his Western guests with the water his own family drank, which was not boiled long enough. Each year I could count on losing 10-20 pounds from continual diarrhea, until I learned to stay in hotels and refuse all water not served from n unopened bottle or a five-star hotel or restaurant. I also learned to avoid any raw fruit or vegetable. Particularly missing salad, I would occasionally get one at an up-end restaurant, where I could also drink as much water from the glasses as I pleased.

            Next came cut-and-sewn knits I dubbed "Sweater Girl", borrowing and loosely translating shapes from male French court dressing to make beautifully detailed sweaters with again, a twelve-gauge thread. I would quickly learn to make our own yarn, mixing rayon’s with the cottons for sheen, and in some cases knobby yarns to offset the inexactness of the hand knitting. Always I employed signature buttons, frequently designing the button series myself as a value- add-on.

            So, getting back to Yoga Toga, my last new product launch for A People United while I was partner there for a decade, I was so pleased with Underarmour’s active wear fabric when it first came out and I was designing  clothing that I sought to make or find similar fabric far and wide--well, New Delhi and Kathmandu,  but not Singapore and Taiwan, it's true. I struck out on their Secret Wicking Formula but what I DID find was an elegant, fluid viscose to inspire a line of shapes I called "Yoga Toga" which immediately racked up another 25% for the company in sales that season.

             It would take GAP two more years to find and implement MY viscose. That producer sold the product, unbeknownst to us, in France, with MY logo of MY design, as well as to us. He was shortsighted not only in this way, as to building and always breaking trust with us, but also I could never get him to accurately pre-shrink the cotton/viscose blend and DRY it in machines. In India, it seems, all clothing is dried in the fresh air, on lines, over balconies. It’s true Parmod, who was moving from a printing roller business into clothing manufacture with us, researched all the latest innovations and put the best machines in his factory and had the cleanest conditions I’ve ever seen overseas in any factory. He was astute enough to demand monies for our deliveries up front, while another producer, always a bit shortsighted too in never recognizing real deadlines, and always trying to pinch a penny,  would gain our obligation in the same way or first inappropriate producer did: by extending credit far too long. In this way we were forced to keep producing without proper observation of quality and delivery standards, which cost the company back in the U.S. in customer satisfaction, and wrought unnecessary returns and loss of revenue.

            This was a continual problem with Delhi manufacturers.  Only in Nepal, and only with my favorite producer, would we get exactly what we asked for..

            I always say most people do ninety-five percent of a job. But where Excellence lies is in the last five percent. Prakas would not only give the extra five percent, but frequently an extra five to twenty percent effort on top of that. With his impeccability of word and deed, it’s no wonder he is the Karate Judge for South Asia. (see short story excerpt "The Season of Mangoes," Drumming Again).

                                                                                                                                             –copyright by Marie Payzant