A137 | Our First Factory Open Day: What Happened When We Invited Everyone's Families In

Two weeks ago, we did something we had talked about for years and never quite gotten around to doing: we opened the factory doors to our employees' families. Spouses, parents, children, and in a few cases, grandparents — nearly two hundred people came through our Xiamen facility on a Saturday afternoon, and what happened was something that none of us fully anticipated.

We had expected it to be a nice gesture. A way to say thank you to the people who share their lives with our team members. We had arranged small tours, some food, a few demonstrations. What we had not anticipated was how much we would learn about our own workplace by seeing it through other people's eyes for the first time.

The Children at the Looms

The moment that we keep coming back to happened about an hour into the open day. We had a loom running at reduced speed — safely contained behind a viewing area — so that families could see how ribbon is actually made. The adults watched with polite interest. The children were transfixed.

One small girl, maybe seven years old, the daughter of one of our weaving technicians, pressed herself against the viewing barrier and stared for what must have been five minutes without moving. She was watching the shuttle — the component that carries the weft thread across the warp — and you could see her tracking its rhythm, back and forth, back and forth. Her father stood next to her. At some point she looked up at him and said, in a completely matter-of-fact tone: "So that's what you do every day."

He told us this story afterwards. He said he had tried to explain his job to her before — "I make ribbons," "I work at a factory" — and she had never really understood. Seeing the machine, seeing the ribbon come off the loom, seeing the connection between the motion and the product: that was what made it real. He said he felt, for the first time, that his daughter actually knew what he did. We found this genuinely moving, and a little humbling.

What the Families Saw

We gave families a condensed version of the journey a ribbon takes through our facility: from the raw yarn cones that arrive from our suppliers, through the weaving room, through dyeing, through finishing and inspection, to the final packaged spools in our warehouse. We had not realized how long this journey is until we tried to explain it in forty-five minutes.

The dyeing house was the most popular stop. Something about the colours — all those vivid vats, the steam, the transformation of white yarn into something brilliant — connected with people immediately. One of our senior dye technicians, who is usually quite reserved in the workplace, spent twenty minutes happily explaining the chemistry of colour uptake to a group of visiting teenagers who were asking far more detailed questions than we had expected. We watched him come alive in a way that we had not seen in the day-to-day rhythm of the job.

This, too, taught us something. A person who is good at their work and quiet about it in the workplace can be genuinely passionate and articulate about it in a different context. We suspect the open day brought out qualities in our team that their normal working environment does not always call for.

The Picnic Afterwards

After the factory tour, we moved to a nearby park for a company picnic. We had decorated the tables with lengths of ribbon from across our collection — not as a marketing exercise, but because it seemed right, and because it turned out to be a practical way to identify the tables from a distance. Some of the children spent a significant portion of the picnic reorganizing the ribbons into patterns on the tables. We chose to interpret this as approval.

The picnic was where the afternoon became genuinely relaxed. People who had worked alongside each other for years but rarely spoken beyond the needs of the job found themselves in conversation. Families met each other's families. The oldest employee on the floor, a woman who has been with us for eighteen years, sat with the three newest hires and their partners and, by all accounts, talked for two hours. We do not know what they talked about. We are glad they did.

What People Said

We asked a few team members afterwards to share what the day had meant to them. The responses were consistent in a way we had not predicted.

Almost everyone mentioned some version of the same thing: that having their family see the factory made the work feel more real to them, not just to their relatives. One of our finishing team, a woman who has been with us for six years, said: "I have been explaining my job to my mother for six years and she has never quite believed that what I do is actually a skill. After Saturday, she finally understands. She watched me check a roll of velvet and she said, 'I had no idea how much you were paying attention.'" She said it had changed something for her — not in how she does the work, but in how she understands her own relationship to it.

Another team member, one of our newer dye technicians who joined us last year, said the best part for him was watching his younger brother — a university student studying engineering — get into an argument with one of our senior technicians about the chemistry of polyester dyeing. "They were arguing for forty-five minutes," he told us. "My brother was wrong, by the way, but he learned something. So did the technician." We thought this was a perfect description of what an open day is supposed to produce.

What We Took Away

We have been thinking since the open day about why it mattered so much, and we think the answer has something to do with visibility. People want to know that what they do has a shape in the world — that it is something, not just something that happens. Our team members know this intellectually, but there is a difference between knowing it and having your seven-year-old daughter watch a loom and understand it for the first time.

We are going to make the open day an annual event. We are also going to stop treating the idea of inviting people in as a special occasion. Our factory is not a secret. The work that happens here is genuinely interesting, the people who do it are worth knowing, and the families who support them deserve to see what their relatives are actually part of.

If you have been a client of ours for any length of time, you are welcome to visit. The open day reminded us of something we should probably have known already: the best thing we can do for our brand is to let people see what we do, honestly and without staging anything. We are not hard to find, and we will put the kettle on.