This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Have you ever looked into your closet before a date and thought, 'I have nothing that fits'? This was the thought of Ian Landi, co-founder of Molded Apparel.
Landi likes clothes that fit and believes that many others do as well. He feels better about himself knowing that his clothes flatter his body shape instead of someone else's. With this idea in mind and a closet full of ill-fitting clothes, Landi decided to find a way to make a shirt that fit him, a size-you, if you will.
In his pursuit to create the perfect shirt for himself, he inadvertently created the company Molded Apparel. His quest inspired him to develop a computer program to draw out the shirt patterns and to design and build a machine that would cut them from cloth.
Not long after playing with the idea he pitched it to his partner, Henry Remington, who is an engineer by trade. Remington and Landi attended the same high school and had been business partners in the past. Although they each pursued different courses in life, the duo knew that they had similar interests in business and that they worked well together.
The two have spent the better part of two years learning how to best get a shirt to fit a person's body from five customer-provided measurements.
These measurements are submitted online through the Molded Apparel website and then put into a program to design the you-sized shirt pattern in the computer. The computer then relays the information to the cutting machine and the template for the shirt is made. Molded Apparel staff then take the cuts of fabric and hand-sew them together. Since shrinking is an issue, the team then puts each shirt through a shrinking process and then ships it to the customer.
When Remington and Landi are not discovering new ways to make clothing, they spend their time outdoors. Each one not only enjoys nature but feels passionate about preserving it. This passion drove the duo to seek out an environmentally-friendly and sustainable cloth for their shirts. Their search led them to a fabric that is a combination of cotton and bamboo, both sustainable crops.
A major problem in the clothing industry is wasted fabric due to cutting out the pattern for the clothes. Keeping with the eco-friendly mission, Landi and Remington use a laser cutter and computer programs, designed by them, to cut only the necessary fabric needed to construct a shirt, cutting back on waste.
Their commitment to nature has motivated Remington and Landi to create a business with a carbon neutral footprint. The men understand that there is some waste involved in manufacturing shirts and have dedicated time to planting trees to neutralize their environmental impact.
Currently, this Longmont-based business is still in its launching period and has started a Kickstarter campaign to get off the ground.
In the future, Landi and Remington hope to make other clothes, expanding from t-shirts, to different shirt patterns, to pants, shorts and even dresses and other articles of clothing.
