Bibliotheca: Banana for Scaled Production

 The Bibliotheca theme has shifted to being bimonthly. Due to my ongoing health concern (hopefully fixed at the end of July), this schedule shift is pretty darn helpful. So, when asked for ideas for prompts, I threw out a silly one: banana for scale. Because my fellow bloggers are also goofballs, now a bunch of Real Fashion Experts are writing about bananas and scales. Putting my own twist on things (as usual), I've decided to write about the scale of production for lolita.

I gave my scale a banana, but it didn't like it much and told me "Err."

I think that, as lolitas, we have difficulty conceptualizing how small lolita really is, and how few items are actually in each release. The tendency to lack a sense of scale applies especially to newbies who ask why they can't buy lolita on Amazon or from Target, but basically nobody knows what the hell is going on.  This makes a lot of sense-- most brands regard production quantities as insider information; not trade secrets, but definitely not something you'd tell just anyone. However, Chinese brands are typically a little more open with this information, as the Taobao interface shows information about order quantities, and brands that rely heavily on preorders may communicate the need for extra production time for popular items, as with NyaNya Lolita's incredibly popular Madoka Magica collaboration, which reached over ten thousand orders between cosplay and lolita communities.

NyaNya Lolita's Madoka Collab

Ten thousand orders is almost unimaginable outside China. China has a thriving lolita scene with many popular brands that generally target a domestic Chinese customer base and use domestic manufacturing, enabling quick and somewhat inexpensive production on a large scale. Large brands like Infanta and Summer Fairy might sell hundreds of items, or even a couple thousand for an incredibly popular release. Finding items from these larger brands is fairly easy, but they often come in multiple sizes, which complicates shopping.

Infanta's Cake Tree Tiered JSK shows a whopping 400 units sold

Manufacturing numbers are less clear for Japanese brands that manufacture items overseas-- printing custom fabric for Angelic Pretty's prints probably requires some significant volume, but it's likely in the hundreds. This keeps the exclusivity high and risk low. On the other hand, according to an interview with Stephano, Atelier Pierrot keeps their manufacturing local for their low quantities, which make the variety of sizes they sell economically viable. I'd estimate that they produce no more than a few dozen for each of their fantastic plus size releases, which means that every unit sold makes a real financial difference to the company. These brands have a lot of prestige in lolita, so they're somewhat easy to find secondhand as well.

Finally, the smallest brands are those that outsource manufacturing minimally or not at all, like Vierge Vampur in Japan, with only one designer/sewist, or Belladonna in the U.S., which is mostly two designers with occasional family help. Sometimes items are premade one-of-a-kind, often pieces are made to order, or occasionally there may be as many as a dozen ready-made pieces in a series, but they're rarely identical, and sizing can be standard or item-by-item. Items by these tiny, almost-DIY brands are near-impossible to find secondhand, so it's worth going to the designer directly. 

So with this broad range of items ranging from unique to produced in the thousands, how does lolita's scale compare to mainstream fashion? 

Factory minimums for mainstream fashion are typically in the thousands, though a low minimum might be as small as a few hundred-- this is more than the total sales of most large pre-orders, and each of those minimums is for each colorway and size, not the order as a whole. Production and materials price goes up dramatically as scale decreases, so small manufacturing is much pricier per unit.

Even the largest lolita preorder doesn't compare to the smallest, most niche mainstream release in quantity. That's part of the reason why good lolita clothing is expensive; people need to get paid. For big companies, lolita just isn't a good investment. We're eye-catching, but we'd never clear the order minimums.

Economies of scale and labor ethics bring us back to the topic of bananas, specifically the unethical labor practices and enormous production quantities that keep the prices of bananas low. I can buy a banana (like the one I gave my scale) for less than a minute's worth of pay precisely because the people growing, packing, and selling the bananas cannot. In the end, lolita cannot be purchased at Walmart because the production levels are unimaginable, the audience is too small, and the scale is not bananas.