Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work
#343: Aidan Meany (Founder of Found Surface) (pt. 1 of 2)
Today we released part one of our interview with Fashion entrepreneur, Aidan Meany. He’s the founder and CEO of Found Surface, a Cleveland-based factory specializing in apparel and soft goods. Aidan leads the company’s innovation in digital knitting—blending technology with traditional craftsmanship to create high quality and sustainable goods.
Before Found Surface, Aidan launched Impossible, an experimental art store and project space that became a creative catalyst in Cleveland’s art and design community.
Aidan is becoming a major player in the field of fashion manufacturing, so join us for this motivational and informative interview! https://foundsurface.com/
Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.
Andy Heise:Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise
Nick Petrella:and I'm Nick Petrella.
Nick Petrella:Fashion entrepreneur Aidan Meany is on the podcast today. He's the founder and CEO of Found Surface, a Cleveland-based factory specializing in apparel and soft goods. Aidan leads the company's innovation in digital knitting, blending technology with traditional craftsmanship to create high quality and sustainable goods with traditional craftsmanship to create high quality and sustainable goods. Before Found Surface, Aidan launched Impossible, an experimental art store and project space that became a creative catalyst in Cleveland's art and design community. You can learn more about Found Surface at the link in the show notes.
Nick Petrella:Thanks for coming on the podcast Aidan
Aidan Meany:, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to dig in. You've got some good. You know good folks in the past and I'm happy to you know join a nice lineup of alum.
Nick Petrella:Excellent. Well, let's start by having you tell us how you got started in fashion. Did you major in design or merchandising or something else?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, I'd say my roots actually go back to way before college. Um, so I was, I was 10, 10, 11, 12 when I was learning, uh, how to, how to sell, via my grandmother who, uh, you know, taught my whole family, um, you know, passed from, passed on from her great grandma, her mother, um, my great grandmother and I eventually went into industrial design. So the path kind of took me full circle into actually I don't want to go into fashion design, which was a mentor of mine in high school's strict advice that she felt very strongly about.
Nick Petrella:Oh, okay, Just why is that did she ever say?
Aidan Meany:okay, just why is that? Did she ever say yeah? So you know, she did an excellent job mentoring me in the tailoring you know craft and was essentially like I taught you everything. So, uh, like you're going to spend a lot of time, uh, kind of going over things that we've, we've already done and you're going to pigeonhole yourself in a career, uh, only being able to design clothes, whereas if you go to industrial design, you'll be focusing more on systems thinking, designing even, you know, sort of like architectural adjacent projects. And she's absolutely correct, because I ended up getting into arguably the most systems thinking situation I could have ever imagined here at found surface.
Nick Petrella:So, yeah, and uh, you know, going on the website, you have digital knitting and I guess is that a lot of what you do, digital knitting yeah, we've got, you know it's, it's a, it's a heavy wing, I'd say, of both our development and production team.
Aidan Meany:So the way I like to look at things is we've got a development team at found surface which can go from I have an idea. So the way I like to look at things is we've got a development team at found surface which can go from I have an idea all the way to something that's ready to be scaled and produced, um, and then we've got this manufacturing team that actually makes that happen right. So we go, we actually go make stuff at scale here. So, uh, both of those teams have digital knitting capabilities. These machines are, in my opinion, the most interesting and really the only way I think the United States are going to be a player in garment making long term and for sustainability, hands down and we're going to unpack more of that later.
Nick Petrella:But actually for those who don't know what digital knitting is, can you explain what that is and say the costs on those machines?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, totally. So we work with an excellent company called Stoll out of Germany, so they manufacture our machines. These are the quickest way to kind of think about them or start to get a visual in your head is they're like 3D printers for textile and soft kits. So if you know what a loom is, that's helpful. It's like a loom that's also a 3D printer, and the digital component is the most groundbreaking part. So it all starts in a software, it all starts on a computer and you're actually using a coding language to tell the needles what to do. So you we've got, uh, our biggest machine is, uh is an 80 inch bed, so you've got 80 inches worth of needles. And these needles are, you know, like when you think of a sewing needle, almost, but a lot more complicated. It's like four sewing needles all fit together vertically, but, um, those needles, you're telling uh in in the computer program whether you want a pattern, whether you want to do. You know some pretty insane techniques, like like goring, which is really like layering, it's how they do, like the, the seat, like the head seat covers in your car, like when you get like really like volumetric stuff. Yeah, um, so you can really push it in any direction you need.
Aidan Meany:Um, the equipment was originally made for footwear uppers and that has traditionally been the main use that it's been used for. So overseas companies are making nike fly knit on it, they're making all of the knitted uppers for your shoes. On this stuff, and where we've really come in, I mean, we've done a lot of firsts here. But the way that we look at it is we haven't taken any of these machines and said, okay, this is what Stoll says they're great for, let's go make these things. We've taken them and we've said, okay, these machines are digital, which means you can hack them. Let's go see all of the ways that we can go make manufacturing in the united states more sustainable and more realistic. Wow, so that's been our approach. Um, as, like a young team, I think that's sort of just the nature of things we're like. We don't want to do it the way they tell us to do it. What?
Nick Petrella:can it be? Yeah, great.
Andy Heise:You open the box and there's the book and you're like, what's this?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, right right, it's a computer game, I mean, and you've got a bunch of software computer folks that are interested in this. It's a very comparable sort of occupation. So they're all computer guys and gals. So yeah, it's pretty sweet to watch them really look at this as hacking projects?
Andy Heise:Yeah, so are you building actual 3D models that are basically created by these machines, or is that not the right way to think about it?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, yeah, there's a couple. It's varying by project, but almost everything is starting in the native programming software to the equipment that stole makes. So um, that that program is called create plus. Um, so create plus is, uh, it looks kind of like like ms paint almost, or something kind of like an old school. It feels kind of more analog than it should, but, um, that's why you need to do it for four to six years to really understand it.
Aidan Meany:It's not something you can pick up over overnight, um, but yeah, you can, you can throw artwork in there, you can do logos, you can actually shape things you can. There's so much you know that's done in there, so that's cool, yeah. Yeah, sometimes we'll do a 3d render, though we use another program that does a lot of our fit modeling, primarily on the cut and sew side of things. So I'm happy to kind of explain that too. But both our development and production teams are are broken up by traditional cut and sew method production and then the digital knitting side of it. So we do, but we do both of those and they overlap a lot, and that's sort of our specialty too. So happy to elaborate on that too.
Andy Heise:Yeah, I'm curious. You said one of the things that your team focuses on is sort of the hacking side, like trying, experimenting, coming up with innovative ways to use the equipment. Do you have an example of one that you've done recently, or one that's maybe you're you're most proud of in terms of, um, an innovative approach to using the machine?
Aidan Meany:Totally Um, I I've got two, two that come to mind, first being um, and we didn't. We didn't invent this, but we've started to apply. I think the way that we've applied it in the market of apparel is really interesting. So, um, the first being a method called intarsia knit. So intarsia knit is a way to knit down a logo, graphic design, sort of pattern, whatever, what. What have you in a very like fine structure? So a thin, thin material. And we initially started this project where we were thinking like how cool would it be if we could make t-shirts that you could customize and we could knit them down for you in like small quantities and you wouldn't need to screen print them at all, because it would just be in one, the logo was
Aidan Meany:in the shirt, right, and so we approached this, looking at it as the traditional way you knit. Anything you want to pattern or logo on is done in a jacquard structure and that's a very traditional thing. But we're like, okay, what if we did like, that makes it really thick. So jacquards are generally very thick. So jacquards are generally very thick. We have a project right now that we're doing a seven-color jacquard and to get the thickness the way we needed it to, we had to start using sewing machine thread instead of yarn, because jacquards just get really thick. So we were like, how do we combat that? So it looks good for a t-shirt. So we started thinking in tar, this, this, this intarsia method, and we're able to knit your normal t-shirt, jersey now with graphics and patterning in it and it's not some alternate structure that's normally done on sweaters or whatever, but, um, that's I'd say that's like one. Yeah, interesting. I mean, that's just top of mind because I'm we're literally doing it right now.
Nick Petrella:But now is that is the benefit that it won't colors, won't bleed, like you know how silk screen comes off. Is that a benefit or?
Aidan Meany:it would. Yeah, I mean the integrity of it and the longevity of it would be much better. It would also just feel like a much more high quality product, but the cost wouldn't necessarily reflect it. So, like the cost to produce, it would still be something that is that of a higher end t-shirt, blank, but you're not needing to go loop in a screen printer or facilitate that like logistics side of things.
Aidan Meany:And then for sustainability too, you're looking at you know, it's funny, we started the project before we had algae ink developed in house. So we were like already thinking along the lines of of if we did all this in organic cotton and we naturally dyed all these things, then there's zero, you know, bad, bad stuff in it and we're not creating any waste in the in the production of the T-shirt. So digitally knit T-shirts is a priority for us overall, kind of leaving the more traditional method, because you just get rid of that cutting waste, you save so much. So that was sort of the the origin of us thinking this way. Um, but the the benefits are that you duck any sort of high minimum, high minimum requirement, both on the screen printing side, because screen printers will charge you, you know, up to maybe a hundred bucks a unit if you're under like 10 or something. So then you're just like I could never. This is never an option for me. So, um, that was, that was the thinking there, I'd say. On the more technical, how do we actually hack the machine side of things? A great example are beanies, and so we've uh, taken the three or four different styles of beanies and made them completely seamless. And so, wow, and not not just seamless, but fat like fast. So we're knitting beanies, a full beanie in six minutes, and it's totally done. Wow, um, and we're currently finding a way to do three at one time across the bed and aim for like 10 minutes or 12 minutes or something. That kind of adds some like nominal time there. But so that was inspired by.
Aidan Meany:I visited a interesting sort of not non-profit facility that was getting contracted by a very large company to figure out how to manufacture their beanies in the states and I kind of heard their their issues of trying to build systems around it to get the cost down. They were competing with vietnam. So it's like you know, you're, you're fighting an uphill, you're fighting an uphill battle there, and they were trying to fight it with labor. They were fighting labor with labor and I'm like, yeah, I'll tell you right now this is going to be a really hard, hard thing, right, and so it.
Aidan Meany:It really got me thinking about beanies and we had started making sewn versions of beanies right away with the machines because it was a no-brainer product for us to to provide and we spent enough time going, okay, if we can just take the hand out of you know, you just look at the numbers of like, okay, the sewn version is eight minutes. And then you know, on the machine and then you've got another 15 minutes of like getting it to sewing, sewing it, packing it, all that stuff. And we're like, how do we take that 15 out and make the knit time shorter? And you just keep going and going and going and we did a bunch of iterations on it and now we have a really incredible product and we have a client right now that needs 10 000 a month and we're figuring you know, we're finalizing that contract and figuring it out. So, um, yeah, it's, you know it's, it's, it's pretty sweet, that's. That's a really example of hacking.
Aidan Meany:It is like no one's going to tell you to go do seamless beanies on these things.
Andy Heise:Well, I mean, that's proprietary to you. It's important that you know how to do that right and no one else does. Or what's the community? I guess where I'm going with that and we'll get back to our questions here in just a minute, but where I'm going with that is like what's the community like around people who use these types of machines? Is it an open, sharing community, or is it pretty competitive and not everybody's kind of creating their own proprietary processes and uses their proprietary materials? That sort of thing?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, I think that we are showing a lot of folks in the industry that it's okay to talk about it. I'd say we're coming. We're coming in as a more progressive partner, competitor, whatever term you want to call it. Sure Saying, like I look at everyone in this industry as a potential partner, especially in the States. I mean it's a really slim landscape and I'm sure we're going to get into that too. But like the, to date it's always been a very gate kept sort of. I figured this out, I'm gonna hang on to it. Um, there's been lots of history of lawsuits on who owns what method, on like some type of flatbed machine, like some type of knitting machine, that's like there's a long history of legal battles there and like it never resolves in any sort of clarity except like hey, no one owns this stuff. If you figure it's like it's like computer software, like it's not.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, is that patentable?
Andy Heise:The process, surely, can be patented so yeah, I think it's code, so it yes, it's like, again, it's it, and it's also small.
Aidan Meany:It's a small enough community, yeah, where and it's new to the us where, like, these things haven't mattered overseas, like they're just it's, it's been, you's been, you know, call it, you know Nike has been farming their ideas out to, to, to overseas, and nobody really cares or knows or understands enough about what's happening to say, like, wait, how can we like all kind of learn about this or whatever.
Aidan Meany:So I think us coming to the States I mean, we are the second largest knit programming team in the United States, so like, and our factory space opened in February of last year. So there's, we're new and small, but we're suddenly a leader in this, leader in this and um, and I think that we have been sort of this voice of there's no benefit to anybody closing doors here. Yeah, we need to be sharing these ideas. We all want to reshore, we all want to make high quality stuff. There's plenty of apparel to get made like. It's easier if we all talk about it, and so I think that we're sort of making people get excited again, like, oh, this isn't such a, you know, doggy, dog kind of kind of situation here.
Andy Heise:So and so, um, this sort of uh, non-traditional path back into fashion that you've taken, uh in in, uh, that that we just have been talking about, at what point with this company, did you realize? Hey, this could actually work. We have something here that could be a sustainable business venture.
Aidan Meany:Yeah, great question. I think I've had a couple of those moments, and the fact that they keep happening is what really makes it exciting.
Andy Heise:It keeps escalating, so to speak?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, I think there's. You know, by the nature of being in an industry that nobody tells you is viable anymore. Right, yeah, you're used to the you know David and Goliath situation and any time you get an inch you're like, oh my gosh, this is like amazing. So I think the first moment was when I decided to actually start the business in college. I was at Syracuse University studying industrial design, and I was in school when COVID hit, and so I'm now sent to Zoom school and the whole major I was in. I was like woodworking and metalworking, fabricating things the whole time. And then school became imagine, you're making these things and I'm like this is not the same thing. I could just watch YouTube videos all day and get the same deal. And so I had all this free time. I had tons of free time compared to what I was doing and so I started researching.
Aidan Meany:Um, what started? This started as a what am I going to do when I graduate? Sort of a conversation with myself and I'm like, okay, I'm here because I love making things. I want to be in apparel. If I, I started to have the harsh reality of if I graduate, I'm going to go design things, somebody else is going to take credit for them and then they're going to ship them thousands of miles away and I'm never going to see it get made and I'm going to be told to get on to the next idea and I'm never going to see the process of making stuff ever again. So I really just started looking for job opportunities of like cut facilities, apparel design, even if it was small, mom and pop, whatever, and I by like, by nature of that research, I was naturally driven to like build a little supply chain of folks that I, in the back of my head, I'm like, I know how clothes are made, I know who's necessary, and I strung along this little supply chain of folks that were farmers you know 100 year family farmers in in Texas, and then these incredible women-owned cut and sew facility in LA and all these different players that I started to not only sort of demo my own product and like use this supply chain and make my own stuff this way, um, but I started opening this up to other folks and acting as a consultant.
Aidan Meany:So I was like I see, if you want to make stuff in the U? S and that's, that's when the interest in community behind, we want to make things here. It's a tragedy, we lost this. We want to make things here. It's a tragedy, we lost this. Yeah, these are good people that are making things.
Aidan Meany:Uh, all of the issues. It brought to light to me that, like, all of the issues are customer experience, account management and then innovation and technology. Like, the issues are like, we need to automate things. We're still doing stuff the way that's been done hundreds of years ago and we need to have factories that have direct communication with you know, we have such an opportunity to have a closer dialogue about projects than we do by offshoring it, so, um, that those were the two areas where I go okay, well, if we just built a business and focused not just on being a great factory, but focused on being a great communicator, an excellent factory, and have a hand in the actual innovation that's taking place Far away. Honestly, a lot of these digital knitting machines are in Germany, but we need to understand, in the places where lots of things are getting made, how they're getting better and better and better and bring some of that back, um, because people, people really want it.
Aidan Meany:So that was the first moment. That was the first moment I was like I have so many people that are coming to me saying I want to make in the us and I don't know how and I'm scared, I don't know who to talk to. Um, and then I'll say, like, the next catalyst and and I know you guys mentioned this earlier is opening the impossible gallery and store space in Cleveland was my litmus test to this idea. So I had made some product using this American supply chain. It sold really well and I was still in this like, am I a brand? Like is Founsurface an apparel brand that just does things really well, learning quickly, sort of behind the scenes, that the biggest impact I can make on this industry the whole reason I'm doing this is because we need to redirect the way we make things, just as a as a human race. Not in the united states we don't do much of it. We need to set a new standard here. But I'm realizing kind of quickly as I'm releasing this retail product, like, okay, I actually can have a bigger impact by making everybody else's stuff Um, and that sold well enough to open this community store.
Aidan Meany:And so what I did was I was like, okay, I'm not fully sold yet on making this whole venture a brand.
Aidan Meany:What I will do is test this interest by creating a physical place in my community to have conversations about it, and it was a retail store and a gallery space and we did music shows and we did all kinds of different. I mean we had a children's book author come in and release their book and read to kids and have a whole play session and we did full festivals of seven, eight different artists come in. I mean, we've done all kinds of stuff, and so what we did is we met with real people that are are actually buying apparel merchandise, that are selling clothes, that are designing clothes or you know, in one way or another they're interacting with clothing and hear about, like what they what they want and what their current issues are. And we'd learned a whole bunch of other stuff too, you know, but that was pretty much the what drove us to being like all right, we have what we need here to really go build an effective model.
Nick Petrella:Yeah, and speaking of a model, you, probably more so than anyone else that I'm aware of, you could be totally vertically integrated, because you can do everything.
Andy Heise:That's what I'm saying. You created the ecosystem that allows this to work, right.
Aidan Meany:Yeah, yeah, it's really attractive to go think, okay, well, how could I leverage that from a brand's perspective and be a really amazing clothing brand? But again, we were so mission-driven that how impressive our efforts in manufacturing are can get diluted by somebody seeing us and thinking, oh, they're just a cool, another sustainable brand, one of many, or you know whatever. And when we're really in the mission of like, no, we want to be producing for the largest apparel companies in the United States and make their transition to sustainability not a scary thing for them and their shareholders.
Andy Heise:That is the goal and if you can do that, if you can, if they, if you can help them do that, you can do whatever you want in terms of brand or what, if you can have those people using your platform, your systems and processes Right, I mean, and I could go start a clothing company that contracts found surface.
Aidan Meany:If I want to go do that and I think I have effective marketing and I can play the Shopify game and do that, that's amazing and I would use found surface to make it all happen.
Andy Heise:The analogy I'm thinking of is probably not a great analogy, but Amazon Web Services. It started as just supporting Amazon. They created the infrastructure because they needed it and they're like wait a second, we're pretty good at this.
Aidan Meany:We could expand this and offer it to other, and now you know netflix and everybody else uses amazon servers because of uh and now you know exactly and I've learned I mean, just the entrepreneur in me has learned so many other issues along the supply chain trail that I want to tackle and I have to sort of hold myself back and stay focused on what really matters with found surface and then go say once this is nailed and I have the bandwidth, then we can go do some other stuff, because there's some really interesting other things to go do but they require, like a particular focus. Yeah, you.
Nick Petrella:You mentioned sustainability and let's unpack that a bit. We've had a variety of people from the fashion industry and andy, what do you think?
Andy Heise:I think they've all mentioned sustainability yeah, I mean, everybody recognizes that fast fashion and throwing away clothes is not a good model.
Nick Petrella:So what are all the ways found services produces their goods sustainably.
Aidan Meany:Yeah, I'd say it's honestly a hard question to answer because it's been rooted in everything we do. So it's less like how is found surface sustainable and more like found surface. Is sustainability like? It's less like it's more interwoven in everything we're doing. So I think the we spoke about digital knitting.
Aidan Meany:I think that prioritizing that as a production method, um, is the clearest path to zero waste apparel production, um, or the closest thing to it, and so when you're knitting garments down using digital flatbed knitting, you can only knit down the components you need, um, whereas more traditional methods of creating apparel, you are buying bulk textile yardage and cutting that stuff out. There's really good work. We we do this too because there's a lot of ways in which, uh, the traditional cut and sew method isn't going away, um for like, certain products, and so we use pattern optimization software for cutting, so like basically saying like all right, how do you really max out this rectangle for all these different pieces? But pushing a transition to using digital knitting is something that really needs to happen, because, instead of cutting out these pattern pieces out of a rectangle, you're knitting, you're going yarn in and you're knitting your textile, as you're essentially cutting the pattern piece out at the same time. So that is not only like a time you know save, major labor save, but also major material, you know loss sort of just gets you know eliminated there. So I think that's that's huge. Now there's always a little bit right there's.
Aidan Meany:Sometimes we're like we're we're a development facility, so we're making things that don't exist.
Aidan Meany:So the process of doing that, we look at sustainability differently in development than we do in production, or at least the ways to get really good at both are very different.
Aidan Meany:So because I'd say the top kind of overarching solution here is that we do all of our sampling out of organic cotton, is that we do all of our sampling out of organic cotton, which many people say this is absolutely nuts because it's the most expensive thing to prototype out of. But we do it because it generates so much waste and we compost that waste with Rust Belt Riders here in Cleveland. So we keep it organic because there's no bleach, there's nothing in there that will mess up a traditional food composting pile. So they come every Wednesday and take our lunch scraps and they take all of our cotton waste and they put it in the same thing and it goes and becomes soil that you can go buy in the store. So, um, that's the. That's the most impressive sort of only like we, we have not seen anybody compost as a factory. It's a testament to where we put our dollars and our focus is. You know that stuff isn't is not cheap, but it's really important to just bake into your you know expenses.
Nick Petrella:Do you? Do you work with wool and other materials too, or no? Is it only cotton?
Aidan Meany:Yeah, totally so, yeah, I'm so. I'm so glad you asked that. I think wool is a really interesting like wool has been overlooked to a a disgusting degree. I think like we had such an opportunity before we decided to just go make everything out of plastic to learn more about it and learn about how we could implement it and sort of build some foundational models around farming it. Um, that would really help us out. So some numbers, some numbers that keep me up at night are we're burning half a million pounds of it in ohio, um, because farmers are raising them for meat and they're they're shearing them to keep them alive for meat, and then they're right, and they're putting them in trash bags and they're filling up barns full of it and every year they go. I gotta get rid of this somehow, because I don't know what to do with it.
Nick Petrella:So do you get it cheaper, since it's waste?
Aidan Meany:So I mean that was my that was my first question.
Aidan Meany:I was like let's use it, right, yeah. And then you dive into that and you realize like, oh man, there's so many things, exactly so. So the main, the main problem here too, is for a farmer. So you got, you know, you've got so many farmers in ohio that do like you know, 10 to 20 sheep, like small, but like could be, if they got together you could have some real, you know, output. Yeah, um, noted too, we have the most alpaca per square foot in Ohio of any state in the entire United States. So there's alpaca here too that can be used for apparel.
Andy Heise:What if there's no market.
Aidan Meany:Similar conversation. No, there's zero. There's zero use for it, so nobody's, nobody's tapping into that.
Nick Petrella:Yeah Right, there's, there's a. There are gotta be a bunch of them near, near where I live.
Aidan Meany:Yes, and so we and the origin story. Look, look up the origin story of why we have so many cause. It's hilarious. It was like it was like a pyramid scheme of selling them as pets to celebrities and then it got out of hand. So it's kind of funny. I'm like why? Why we're here is really funny.
Aidan Meany:But, um, but, overall right, yeah, process processing is the issue. So farmers have like single digit options in terms of processing partners. There's like two or three that are just open door, like hey, anyone can send us fiber and we'll turn it into a yarn for you. They've got two plus year wait lists and the costs are crazy. It makes no sense.
Aidan Meany:So, overall, what we're, what we've decided to work on, because we feel like this is way worth it in the long term, like for just from a, from a, how much we could get our hands on, yeah, and how and how little we would need to import from far away and duck those costs. We've partnered with West Virginia University to build proprietary spinning equipment, aka the whole processing system, and put that in the power of the farmer to do, so that they don't need to pay for it. Plug the hole there by making an easy to train, smaller, more democratic sort of system that allows them to just send yarn to us and then we make product out of it and send product back to them, um, instead of like, hey, go figure it out, good luck.
Nick Petrella:Here's where the farms, you know, where the processing facilities are a couple years ago I had a conversation with some fashion faculty. We're at some event and it hit me then and I'm remembering it now because it's applicable to you. I said why don't you create a course called farm to fashion, I mean, and you can talk about what it's like right, raising the actual ant? I mean, there's so many different things. Talk about vertical.
Aidan Meany:That's about the start of it Totally, and it's another example of we haven't innovated it or changed it in a long time and it being the processing system. Over 90% of American wool is processed overseas, mostly in China. So you even have like the origin, like so much of us wool is originating here and then getting shipped all the way across the entire planet to turn into yarn and then and partially that's because that's where the yarn is going to get turned into goods material right, because there's a market again.
Andy Heise:There's a market for the, for the right, yeah right.
Aidan Meany:But again, if you've got, if you don't have an issue with that and you know, and you know you'd look at what we're doing at Fond Surface, being able to solve the production side of this, then you need to. You need to process it here Like there's no, we're not going to go play that game so yeah. That's great, it's fascinating.
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