Our Cutters and Our Seamsters - Leave a message for the team!

Ninth Isle is honored to present our hard working VIPs, who each had a significant hand in hand-making your cloth face mask. It's a little early for a celebration or ceremony, but considering that many of you have invested your time to thank us and our team, this thank-you page has been made.  

Please meet our 2 fabric cutters, Samson and Way.

These two men are responsible for cutting fabric into the exact shapes and proportions of the face mask. Their cut fabric acts as an intuitive instruction manual and guide for our seamsters to help them quickly and accurately sew each mask. If you're wondering, we actually call and pronounce his name as "Way". Like "Way-to-go". Our longest running pun is "If there's Way, there's a way."

Next we have our seamstresses and seamsters. Let's use a list for this one. If not for each person, we would be incapacitated by the sheer volume of orders. 

Winnie, Julie & Ryan, Thina, Nga, Annie, Chen (Way's wife), Ann, and yours truly! 

Sewing was a massive challenge. During normal times, production works as an assembly line, each step has a dedicated time and person. During stay-at-home orders, we are only able to do what we can at home with our household members. Luckily, this means that those with kids are able to get free help. Those whose children have moved out, well, they just worked extra extra hard. We started with just Winnie and Julie/Ryan. The learning curve was steep, but they stepped up, shared info, and kept pushing out masks one by one. They were able to share this info with our later collaborators to significantly boost production. Each seamstress shared our values of providing necessary face masks for our community and country at an accessible price for all. This means that each person had donated their time and labor. It was this combined efforts on all sides that we are able to provide these quality hand-made multi-layered face masks at such affordable prices. On April 9th, we really saw the power of 8 professional seamsters and 1 nervous amatuer (me). We knocked out 75% - 80% of our backlog, which meant that not a single person waited more than 2 days for their order to get shipped. 

If you'd like to thank our 2 cutters and 8 seamsters, please leave your comments below. Things are still tough on everyone, so your kind words of encouragement keep us going!

We all would like to thank you as our customer, if not for your support and personal recommendations to friends, we wouldn't have the opportunity to use our skills for a good cause!

Note: We might be able to get photos of each person. I know many of them are shy, but let's see who can't be coaxed into OK-ing a little photo for the blog.