California Apparel News

The Evans Group has undergone a reinvention.

Formerly a Los Angeles–based boutique contractor producing samples and garments for brands such as Society for Rational Dress and Geren Ford, The Evans Group has entered into a partnership with a nonprofit group to create a vertically integrated apparel production facility in Oakland, Calif.

MIO, or Made in Oakland, is the product of a $700,000 federal grant given to The Unity Council, a nonprofit community-development corporation, to create approximately 70 jobs in manufacturing sectors affected by job losses due to overseas production. A “welfare to work” project, MIO hires unemployed individuals and pays them living wages with benefits.

The Evans Group, headed up by Jennifer Evans, was brought into the project to provide a business plan and apparel expertise to MIO. Evans, who still runs a sample shop in Los Angeles but no longer offers production services here, manages MIO’s day-to-day operations and was charged with training the facility’s current 22 employees. She hopes to train up to 70 employees before the end of the year. Evans said the current team, in training since October, is now ready to begin taking cut-and-sew jobs.

“MIO invested in machinery and technology and the administrative infrastructure I was never able to build,” Evans said. “This is a fully functioning production facility staffed by well-trained individuals.” Pricing at MIO is very competitive, Evans said. “Pricing for production is 25 percent to 50 percent lower than what I was able to offer at The Evans Group,” she said. Evans does note that MIO’s staff, though well-trained, isn’t quite up to some of the more-complicated contemporary styles and fabrics, but she hopes they will be soon. “We’re only taking the jobs we are capable of right now and working up to the more difficult jobs,” she said. “We aren’t going to be practicing on our clients’ clothes. By Fall, I think we’ll be up to the harder stuff.”

MIO hopes to attract steady work from some of the larger brands that are pulling their production out of China, as well as some of the more niche brands that she worked with in Southern California. “Those bigger brands will act as our cash cows so that we can also work with the sort of independent designers that were our customers in Los Angeles,” Evans said.

Evans, who divides her time equally between Oakland and Los Angeles, still maintains a pattern and sample business in Los Angeles, working with brands such as Scout, Postage and Prophetic. —Erin Barajas