Story behind simple summer dress - Aizu-Momen (cotton cloth) -2

So I introduce an interesting company that made the Aizu-Momen summer dress I talked about on the last post.  Yamma Industry (Japanese: ヤンマ産業） is a small (not sure about its scale but at least it seems so) company located in Kichijoji area in Tokyo that manufactures clothes and other fabric stuff like bags, aprons, etc.  I found on their Facebook page they are making blouses, skirts, dresses, and other kinds of clothes using cotton cloth produced in Ise and Matsuzaka in Mie prefecture, as well as Aizu-Momen.

The most remarkable feature of Yamma is, it is run by a designer and the elderly who live near the company, and all their products are made to order.  Their website explains that when clothes are made, the designer first washes and cuts out the cloth, and then, mainly the old ladies who help the company bring the cut cloth back their home and sew it with their sawing machine to finish the product.  The finished products come back to Yamma, and are sold with 1 to 3-year warranty.

The designer says on the website that not all the elderly who saw the products are professional dressmakers, but she thinks it is not necessary to categorize them into pros and amateurs because the old women are those who have been making and repairing clothes of their children, seriously thinking about how the kids can wear the clothes for long time.  So she says it can be said that they are the professionals of sawing, as mothers of Japan.  Meanwhile, Yamma intricately inspects the products before selling them, and guarantees free repair for some period so the customers feel at ease about the products sewn by them.

I though I like this system for many reasons.  First of all, it creates employment of the elderly, which is simply meaningful in our rapidly aging society.  And I can imagine it might encourage them mentally because those who help the company by the sewing could feel they still have power to contribute the economy and society of this country.  From the viewpoint of the customers, or if I buy some product from them after reading how Yamma is making it, I would feel the warmth of those ladies when touching the clothes even though I won't actually see their face.  I don't know any other shops who provides such warm products.

This is the tag attached to Akko's summer dress.  With the explanation of the product and the company, it says: "This product is made of the cloth that you can use for as much as several hundred years (!) if you take time to take care of it."  These words remind me of what it is like to treasure something.