it's time to break free from the
production chaos
Have you ever experienced:
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The agony of missed deadlines
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Lost sales and
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Damaged brand reputation
Or maybe you've wrestled with:
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Skyrocketing costs due to
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Inefficient processes and
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Unexpected hurdles
These challenges can be both time-consuming and financially draining, hindering your ability to focus on what truly matters: designing and delivering exceptional products.
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Our expert apparel development consultants are here to provide the solutions you need. With our deep industry knowledge and proven strategies, we can streamline your production process and help you scale your brand!
how we can help your brand:
Tech Design
Allow us to run fittings for you, measure and review all of your prototypes, and craft factory-friendly comments that will improve your brand's fit. With our pattern engineering backgrounds, we know the right changes to make to your performance apparel to fit a body in motion. Go from multiple protos per style to just 2 and improve your workload, timeline and annual launch schedule immediately!
Development
Communication with your factory, suppliers and manufacturers is crucial to creating quality apparel. With our 55+ years of experience writing thousands of vendor emails and building hundreds of tech packs over our careers, we know the right verbiage, jargon and temperament it takes to build healthy relationships. Foster collaboration and boundaries all at the same time with our help.
Project Management
A timeline and calendar without a project manager to monitor and maintain it is practically useless. With Rachel's prestigious Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification, we bring elite expertise in helping your team stay on track, deliver on time and produce goods easier every season. With weekly team calls to discuss deadlines and deliverables, we make sure you don't miss a thing.
we help our clients get results like these...
A cycling brand's 4-year plateau at $25 Million year over year turned into $60 Million in annual revenue.
Our development of the fastest cycling race suit in the world won stage #1 at the 2023 Tour de France Femmes.
A dance-wear company went from idea to selling production units in just 4 months of working with us.
A leading outdoor apparel brand had breathing room to interview and hire an internal teammate without missing a single deadline by bringing us on to fill the gap.
our mission
In a competitive fashion and apparel industry that can typically only be understood by spending years or decades working for big brands, it is our mission to educate and truly help brands like yours understand the real processes and practices performed by the largest apparel corporations in the world.
By sharing this information with emerging apparel companies, it is our intention to open opportunities for more diverse and more sustainable brands in our space.
Our goal is to help you succeed by explaining and educating on how the biggest fashion companies work, then implementing and executing a process unique to your needs that allows you to scale in your own way.
what our clients are saying:
Raquel Velez
Working with Rachel is a dream. She asks excellent questions, isn't afraid to say no, and works quickly. She has helped me elevate my brand, not only through sourcing and general production, but also through product development and testing. She helps me make decisions, but doesn't make them for me - it lets me be informed and also stay in control.
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Starr Walker
Rachel has so much talent and knowledge to share with the world! She is always more than happy to help, no matter how small a question or task. She is a fantastic teacher and uses every opportunity possible to lift up her teammates and assist others to grow in their roles. Rachel is a fantastic collaborator who brings creative ideas to the table.
Ryan Jones
Working with Rachel has been nothing short of amazing. She has an arsenal of skills and talents that allows for her to be efficient, effective, and impactful. While Rachel has incredible work ethic and capability, the best part is that she is an absolute pleasure to work with. She has been able to take a complex project, put everyone at ease, provide the outcome we desired, all the while with a smile on her face.
WE ARE NOT YOUR TYPICAL FASHION FREELANCERS...
Unlike so many new fashion contractors emerging in our market today, we are not just starting our careers with this mission. Where so many new freelancers still need to learn what a tech pack even IS and have never run a fitting before, every member of the Unmarked Street team has been mastering these skills for decades!
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It is highly unusual for senior-level industry professionals to leave the corporate world and offer high-level consulting services like we do. Those corporate jobs are warm and cozy with benefits and ladders to climb! We all chose to leave because we saw an opportunity to help brands just like yours to succeed and compete against the billion-dollar companies who are dominating our space.
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Are you ready to rise above the rest and learn how to play with the big brands of the apparel industry?
WE DON'T JUST UNDERSTAND YOUR BRAND, WE UNDERSTAND THE SPORT
Running
Rachel is a Half Iron(wo)Man with multiple half marathons, trail races, 10ks and 5ks under her belt. She got into running after marrying a cross-country athlete in 2010 and will be the first to tell you how addictive the sport can be! Being a runner herself, Rachel is incredibly picky about the garments she wears when training and racing. We've seen her out for a jog in shorts with pins and marks all over them to make sure the fit is just right. We are passionate about running here, and will bring that to your brand.
Cycling
Rachel and her husband are avid cyclists. They're the people watching every minute of every day of the Tour de France (not to mention every other race they pay extra money to watch). With over a decade of experience working for cycling apparel brands, this is Rachel's very niche specialty. Once called a "unicorn" in the industry for truly loving the sport while also having a fashion design degree and a technical background, there are few others in the cycling apparel space that can parallel her skills.
Yoga
If you ask Rachel about her relationship with her yoga practice, she'll tell you that it saved her life. Tough days are behind her now, but there were times when her 6am daily yoga class was one of the few things keeping her going. While Rachel is in her happy place in any yoga class, she loves the consistency and constant honing of skills that come with Hot Yoga. And if you've ever taken a Hot Yoga class yourself, then you know why she's insistent on having the right garments that fit perfectly on the mat.
you deserve the opportunity to hire senior-level talent onto your growing team
Most new apparel brands start off hiring based on a tight budget. When you started, you probably needed low-priced contractors or junior-level professionals to get sh** done.
But as you reach multiple 6 or 7 figures in your brand, it's time to hire the right people for the right jobs. You may no longer be the expert at this level, and you need to surround yourself with people who can execute bigger and better tasks than ever before.
Executives, managers and senior leaders from the apparel industry cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to hire, and that's before benefits, 401k matches and PTO packages you'll need to offer.
With Unmarked Street's 55+ years of collective leadership experience in the performance apparel industry, you get to bring on the senior-level talent that you need, while sticking to a budget that works for your emerging brand.
According to our research by interviewing current industry professionals, reviewing statistics on Glassdoor, Indeed and other job posting sites, the average annual salary in the USA to hire a senior-level apparel developer today is $108,000. And that's before benefits.
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The same research shows that a junior-level apparel developer today is valued between $75,000 - $90,000 per year before benefits.
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What if you could hire TWO senior-level developers onto your team for the same price of hiring a junior-level developer? Benefits and savings to you:
over $150k per year
months of onboarding
no training needed
how much more we can help your brand:
Creative Design
Our team all hold 4-5 year formal degrees in Fashion Design, so while we focus on fittings, pattern engineering and technical design work, we also all have the ability to lend a creative design perspective to your brand. If you don't have a designer already designated inside your company, we help to bridge that gap with our existing services package.
Product Management
Knowing how to negotiate costs and put a line plan with a solid budget together for every season you launch is one thing that sets us apart. Rachel believes that "Numbers Don't Lie!" and that "Everything is Negotiable." She loves to work with factories to bring down costs, improve margins and increase your bottom line.
Production
With a wide network across the globe, we are able to help your brand find manufacturing partners, mills, trim suppliers, warehouse solutions and more. Our relationships in these areas help you get introductions to companies that only work with the best in our industry. We can also help you make sure that each PO you place is aligned with budget and goals.
meet our ceo, rachel erickson
Rachel graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2007 with 3 years of industry experience already under her belt. With a love for technical design and the creativity it allowed her every day, she started her fashion design career as a personal contributor, looking toward a day when she could become a leader in our industry.
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Throughout her 13 years working for some of the biggest companies in the apparel industry, she was promoted 9 times and found herself leading teams and entire departments as a Senior Product Manager.
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She went from being a creative pattern engineer to running the business operations of 2 full apparel departments, where she nearly tripled their revenue in a single year.
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Her focus since then has been using her business acumen to drive profits and success for her clients at Unmarked Street. As someone who never wanted to learn the numbers side of the fashion industry, she knows what it means to dedicate yourself to learning this information, executing it and reaping the rewards of it.
you might be thinking...
We've heard it before: 'Hiring remotely sounds like a lot of extra work.'
But the truth is, it doesn't have to be.
We've made it our mission to not only streamline production processes, but to onboard onto our client's teams quickly, professionally, and seamlessly.
And as a result, many of our clients have found that working with us is a seamless and efficient process. Here's what some of them had to say... ​
"We had reservations about Rachel and her team working remotely, how much time that was going to take and the ROI on the time needed to get them setup. Because in the past that has not worked out.
But it ended up being totally fine and we were delighted with how it was not an issue! They worked seamlessly with our small team and made it really easy."
- Joanna Kreling
Production Manager at Toad & Co.
"I am incredibly impressed at how easy it has been to work with her and have her integrate with our processes and deliver what we need. The work she has done has provided much-needed relief to our in-house team at a busy time, in addition to bringing in the expertise we were looking for."
- Margaux Elliott
Apparel Product Manager at Giro
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