Fashion designers setting up shop in Tacoma

If you happen to’ve by no means considered Tacoma as a trend city, you would possibly must assume once more. Some native designers are working to place the Metropolis of Future on the style map.

It’s doubtless no stretch to say that Tacoma just isn’t often called a trend capital.

However some enterprise homeowners are making their mark within the trend world by staying near residence.

Within the coronary heart of downtown Tacoma, inside an unassuming storefront, the blue-collar metropolis is being sewn into the material of the style world.

DazJon ‘Daz’ Johnson, to those that know him, is the face of a workforce of six males, half of them designers, all of them Black. All however one are Tacoma natives, too. Their 9-year-old firm is Etcetera, or ETC.

“So ETC Tacoma is a males’s boutique retailer; it’s a way of life model,” mentioned Johnson. “We now have totally different items from T-shirts, pullovers, sweats, jackets, hats, equipment and enjoyable stuff like that.”

“So, that is our Anorak jacket,” Johnson mentioned, pulling it off the rack. “That is considered one of our steady items. Nearly all of our stuff is produced domestically. So, we do numerous display screen printing and our DTG, issues of that nature completed domestically by native print outlets.”

All of it in a metropolis not accustomed to creating a trend assertion.

“We had the pleasure of form of all simply being into trend rising up,” mentioned Johnson. “There’s about 5 – 6 of us. So, all of us have our inspirations that we grew up with in trend. And we wished to determine learn how to carry that to our personal yard.”

And if slightly extra upscale is extra your fashion, you could find that right here within the Metropolis of Future, too.

“So, my sister has a home line that she makes right here in Tacoma,” mentioned Sarah Alisdairi.

She and her designer sister, Lana, personal Cocobolo, a girls’s clothes boutique, that’s a six-minute stroll from ETC in downtown Tacoma.

“They’re all made to order,” mentioned Sarah. “A few of them are in retailer, small batch.”

The sisters grew up in Saudi Arabia. However they spent each summer season of their mom’s hometown — you guessed it, Tacoma. So, when it got here time to open Cocobolo, they selected the one American metropolis they’ve grown to like.

“Tacoma – trend, these issues don’t go collectively often,” conceded Sarah.

However they do, for these two.

“We’ve offered classic for a very long time,” she mentioned. “And we love garments and trend. And we categorical ourselves in how we gown. And we dwell right here. So, bringing clothes to Tacoma and clothes manufacturing was vital to us. It’s the place we’re from. It’s our group. And we wished to indicate our creativity and our artwork to our group.”

That creativity is slowly making a reputation for itself within the enterprise of trend, one locally-designed piece at a time.

Each ETC and Cocobolo have a giant presence on-line.

That’s how numerous prospects across the nation discovered them through the pandemic.

Listed below are hyperlinks to their web sites: