About five dozen people lost their jobs after the Stitch Fix plant and plant ceased operations last November, Ford said. Some of them have worked at the sites for decades, he added.
“All those skills are going to go away,” he said.
By March, the plants had reopened as Buck Mason Knitting Mills, and several Stitch Fix employees who had worked at the plants had been rehired.
The Hillington-based cloth mill has begun producing Buck Mason’s T-shirts and other tops from cotton grown in California, Georgia and Texas. In January, Buck Mason hired Albert Bareika as the factory’s knitting supervisor, and he said he planned to release a limited-edition T-shirt made from fabric produced on the factory’s 1940s Singer Supreme machines. Mr Bareika, 66, added that the Singer Supreme machine was one of the few still in operation. He lives near Leesport, Pennsylvania, and previously worked at Stitch Fix at the plant.
At the Mohnton factory, some employees cut and sew T-shirts, while others iron them by hand or pack them for shipping. About 10,000 T-shirts are produced there each month, Mr. Ford said. “By autumn, our goal is to double production capacity,” he added. “The goal is to quadruple it.”
Prim, who lives in the small borough of Mornton, Pennsylvania, in Berks County, said the factory started out making hats and military uniforms before switching to T-shirts. At the factory’s heyday in the late 1970s, the factory and factory employed about 100 workers, and the factory produced about 22,000 T-shirts a week using fabric the factory produced, he said.
