Foreword to the Mechanism report “Sewn Trades Manufacturing in the United States: From Pre-Covid State of the Industry to the Frontline Responses to PPE Demands”

Sara Chester

Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director | The Industrial Commons

November 2025

In a moment of crisis, some of the most important things you can have are cooperation and community. I learned this valuable lesson over the past five years, as COVID-19 and Hurricane Helene brought major challenges to my home in Western North Carolina.

In 2024, when Helene hit our state, we saw that the neighborhoods most able to withstand the impacts of flooding and long-term power outages were those that had created networks ahead of the crisis. This is because when neighborhoods create networks, they become more resilient – an observation backed by scientific research.¹

The same thing happened during the pandemic in 2020. Businesses that form part of our values-aligned textile manufacturing network, the Carolina Textile District (CTD), came together in the same way those neighbors did during Helene. They quickly shifted production to create supplies, like masks and gowns, an act that met critical healthcare needs and allowed businesses to stay afloat during a shuttered economy. But it was more than that – it was how we were organized. The fact that CTD has invested in creating a cooperative network – a federation of companies – allowed us to be responsive to the crisis the moment it showed up at our doorsteps. Long ago we had already begun to organize around values and a dedication to the place where we live and work, and that gave us an advantage over adversity.

Our story is featured in Mechanism’s original report below, but we’re by far not the only ones with a story to share. “Sewn Trades Manufacturing in the United States: From Pre-COVID State of the Industry to the Frontline Responses to PPE Demands” showcases how we and four other sewn trades practitioners were forced to adapt quickly and rely on our networks to survive the pandemic. In this report you’ll find key takeaways from our collective experience that are still important needs for America’s small-scale textile manufacturers, and remain particularly relevant as our communities continue to face myriad challenges from climate change to changing technologies to unstable economies.

One of the most important takeaways discussed below? The need for collaboration over competition.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business or a community development expert or a workforce developer. Fostering interconnectedness and mutual care among small manufacturers requires the same skills you would use in basic community organizing. With bigger corporations during local crises, you see temporary efforts to abandon the pursuit of profit and just focus on people by committing to donating. That’s great, but we less often see a sustained commitment to communities and planet that goes beyond the timeline of a crisis. Local production ecosystems, like the kind we’re fostering in North Carolina, have the power to make that happen by viewing people and place as assets worth uplifting.

During the pandemic, the CTD focused on the “planet” piece of the triple bottom line by prioritizing manufacturing washable masks as compared to disposable ones. For the “people” piece, we decided to offer our manufacturers a reasonable market rate for the products they were making. We knew there would be a moment where the country’s ability to source globally would come back and flood the markets, and we wouldn't be able to compete anymore. But until that occurred, we were going to have a market rate and pay manufacturers well and support our communities at the same time.

Our ultimate goal is to build out companies that are resilient and that root wealth in communities, because that benefits the people who show up every day at work. To us, a job isn't just a place where you go to clock in, clock out, and collect a paycheck. A job should give you an opportunity to grow and develop and thrive, which feeds back into the community. We've seen time and time again how the people working in our ecosystem become the head of the local soccer team, or they join the local rotary club, or they sign up to be on the board of the community college foundation. When you're given an opportunity to be a leader at work, you then become a leader in the community.

And in moments of crisis, particularly in a small rural town like ours, you need leadership like that in every corner of the community – in civic clubs, in churches, in schools, in youth groups. So if we're not developing leaders at work, where else can they grow?

Unfortunately, crises like COVID-19 and Hurricane Helene aren’t going to stop coming. But the only way a small community like ours is going to be strong and have resilience is by having strong, interconnected, and locally-rooted leaders. At the CTD, we’re achieving that by building a local industry that sees community well-being as an outcome of our businesses’ success.

1. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Enhancing Community Resilience through Social Capital and Connectedness: Stronger Together!, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2021.