About five dozen people lost their jobs when Stitch Fix shut down operations at the plant and plant in November, Mr Ford said. Some of them, he added, had worked at the sites for decades.
“All those skills would have been lost,” he said.
By March, the facilities had reopened as Buck Mason Knitting Mills, and some of the employees who had worked for Stitch Fix on them had been rehired.
The Shillington fabric mill has begun producing fabric for Buck Mason’s T-shirts and other tops using cotton from California, Georgia and Texas. Albert Bareika, who was hired by Buck Mason in January as the factory’s knitting chief, said there were plans to release a limited-edition T-shirt made from fabric produced at the factory on a Singer Supreme fabric. machine from the 1940s. The Singer Supreme machine is one of the few still in operation, said Mr. Bareika, 66, who lives in nearby Leesport, Pennsylvania and had previously worked at the factory for Stitch Fix.
At the Mohnton factory, some employees are responsible for cutting and sewing T-shirts, while others iron them by hand or package them for shipping. About 10,000 T-shirts are made there every month, Mr Ford said. “In the fall, we want to double the capacity,” he added. “The goal is to quadruple it.”
The factory in Mohnton, a small neighborhood in Berks County, Pennsylvania, produced hats and military uniforms before switching to T-shirts, said Mr. Pleam, who lives in the neighborhood. During the factory’s heyday in the late 1970s, the plant and factory employed about 100 workers, and the factory made about 22,000 T-shirts a week using fabrics from the factory, he said.
