LG Factory Tour

It is an overcast morning in Gumi. Contrary to a name that evokes cute rainbows of fruit flavor, the view from the hotel window consists of a salvage yard, a river with wide, sandy banks, and a horizontal spread of massive featureless and windowless gray buildings.

Moroso Factory Tour

Moroso, the Italian furniture company known for discovering remarkable designers such as Ron Arad and Patricia Urquiola, assembles between 100 and 150 pieces per day in a factory outside Udine.

Their 130-strong team works in a cluster of humble sheds from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an hour break for lunch. They are overseen by Agostino Moroso, who has worked there for 54 years, and his daughter Patricia, who masterminds the company’s creative side and tracks new designers to work with.

In the hall outside the factory floor, a gray-haired man in charge of textile cutting enjoys vending-machine espresso. Stepping inside yields a candy-colored view of rolls upon rolls of wool felt and other fabrics. There is no specific order to the pile, but the espresso-drinking man knows the type, color, and precise location of each and every one. He reappears and climbs onto a platform, which is attached to a fabric roller that glides 50 feet or so along a table, unrolling the wool. A computer-operated cutter makes calculated patterns across orange felt, which adheres smoothly to the table with help from thousands of tiny suctioning pinholes. The cut pieces are then carefully bagged and labeled. Twenty-five specialized seamstresses sew the upholsteries together.

A muscle-bound man wearing an alligator belt screws the heavy metal base onto a Fjord chair. He runs a steam iron along every sewn seam; the wrinkles shrink and flatten. Nearby, a Take Off chair by Alfredo Häberli sits upside down on a table. Its zippered denim cover won’t quite close around the structural frame, conjuring memories of tight jeans after a well-fed holiday.

The prototyping room is calm today. A welded-metal frame of Urquiola’s Antibody chaise, introduced in Milan this year, sits on the floor. Marino Mansutti, a Moroso family member who has worked here all his life, helping designers turn ideas into realities, is enjoying the calm after the pre-Milan rush. “It was nuts,” he says. Now he finds time to wipe away dust under the phone on his desk.

Marimekko Tour

Beyond a shining white foyer and a canteen infused with fragrant lunchtime aromas, Marimekko’s Helsinki headquarters hides a textile factory in its belly.

Comfortable corridors lead to a cement factory floor partitioned with hulking steel machinery, painted yellow lines that define circulation, and vast shelves stacked with blue-framed screens. Two printing machines, one 30 years old, the other new this year, fill a narrow wing of the cavernous space. Several other machines generate great slow cascades of freshly inked cotton and linen that end in a froth of neatly folded material in industrial canvas carts as big as grange boxes. Accessed by a steel catwalk overhead, a test studio webbed with laundry lines hums under the tireless rotations of two LG Electronics and Whirlpool washing machines.

That Marimekko (which means “Mari’s dress” in Finnish) is a business driven by its designers’ carte blanche approach to design is visible in the distinctive cotton and linen fabrics manufactured here for ready-to-wear designer collections, bags, and to be sold by the yard for interior decoration: exuberant florals by Maija Isola and Teresa Moorhouse, huge brush-stroked leaves by Fujiwo Ishimoto, and hand-sketched city scenes and comic book–colored Finnish landscapes by 24-year-old Maija Louekari.

The factory prints around 1.6 million yards of fabric each year, a process that begins with ink paste made from thickener and dyes. Bellying up to a flatbed printer, a worker wearing heavy earphones and two carpal-tunnel wrist braces pours this ink into a narrow trough along the bottom of the printing screen, on which a pattern has been lain in varying densities of wax. She scoops color from a household saucepan using a plastic yellow scoop typically found in the sauna. This trough passes across the taut fabric once, then the fabric is passed through to the next unprinted spot to lay down the next repeat. The worker searches for flaws, handling some 5 to 20 yards of material per minute. Next, the dye is fixed to the fabric by steam before excess thickener and dye are washed away. To ensure a good feel and brightness, prevent wrinkling, and preshrink the fabric, it is passed through a tenter frame, where a Teflon coat is added and the material is stretched back to its full size (having been shrunk by wet inks). All fabrics are inspected inch by inch by a human eye, flaws marked in pencil at the edges. If only four flaws are found in 40 yards of fabric, the batch is seconded. Approved fabrics are wound to cardboard bolts for sale in shops or to small rolls to be sewn into totes, frocks, or even a Fatboy beanbag.