California Apparel News

Not far from downtown Los Angeles, in an industrial neighborhood dotted with apparel manufacturers and textile companies, Basic Line Corp. has become the go-to guys to embroider those fancy pocket designs seen on the back of some of California’s best premium-denim lines.

The company’s customer list reads like a who’s who of the L.A. denim world: 7 For All Mankind, Citizens of Humanity, True Religion, Paige Premium Denim, Current/Elliott and Goldsign.

“We have the capacity to do 10,000 to 20,000 pockets a day,” said David Shalom, who, with his brother, Azad, owns the embroidery and embellishment company, founded in 1992.

The array of machinery inside their 45,000-square-foot building is as diverse as the denim and other apparel that passes in and out of their doors. Some of their machines are so old—some dating back to 1876—that they could easily be part of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution.

On one floor are rows and rows of metal machines with 750 embroidery heads to work on the squiggles and loops that distinguish one denim label’s pockets from another.

On another floor is an array of smaller machines capable of creating more than 300 novelty embellishments, such as smocking, shirring, pleating, ribbon roses, soutache, chain stitching, crochet stitching, cording, pintucking, laser cutting and heat transfer.

Inside a small room is a library of Basic Line’s embroideries shown on sheets upon sheets of denim fabric filled with various back-pocket designs. There are examples of intricate embellishments that are hard to find. “This is like a candy store for designers,” Azad said.

When the Shaloms launched their business, their bread and butter was embroidering millions of T-shirts for licensees of Disney and Warner Bros. characters. The shirts were often sold at stores such as Target and Wal-Mart. In addition, they embroidered hundreds of T-shirts for Las Vegas resorts and hotels. The hallways of their building are lined with framed samples of their artistic work—from pieces that show a logo for “The Lion King” to an image of the Sphinx for the Luxor Las Vegas.

When Basic Line was working on T-shirts, the company’s factory was working around the clock with 300 employees.

But about six years ago, much of that embroidered T-shirt business went to China and other overseas factories. Fortunately for the Shalom brothers, they had already embarked on doing denim pocket designs.

It all started in 1999 when designer Jerome Dahan, one of the original founders of 7 For All Mankind, walked through their doors to develop pocket art for his then-new blue-jeans line launching in 2000. The result is the simple but well-known long squiggle that is the denim line’s original pocket design. “It was a lot of trial and error,” Azad recalled.

Basic Line has been doing embroidery for 7 For All Mankind ever since. Other denim labels, all produced in Los Angeles and riding the premium-denim wave, soon followed. Now about 70 percent of the company’s embroidery business is taken up by denim labels. The rest are hats, T-shirts and bags.

The embellishment side of the business is heavy on women’s contemporary fashions. “With shorter lead times, manufacturers come to us needing things the next day, and with our large capacity, we can deliver,” David said.

Basic Line, with the help of two technical designers, is able to retool many of its machines to create hard-to-find embellishments. The brothers remember when a childrenswear maker showed up at their factory looking for a certain kind of smocking. He had been searching for two months to find a factory that could do the waistband on a girl’s knit skirt. “He was almost in tears when he found out we could do it,” Azad said. “They had to make their deliveries in a couple of days.”—Deborah Belgum