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In February 2018, I posted an update here on the blog about the FUZZera Jeans prototype #4 that was making its way to me from Italy, and that I’d be reviewing it to see whether or not I’d want to go into production with it despite a few of my ‘design elements’ not being feasible to incorporate into the jeans by the factory in Italy. Now, it is late May 2018, and with a few months gone by, if you’re keeping track, you can probably assume that things with that fourth prototype didn’t quite work out, and that we’ve not gone into production, yet.

In the meantime, on April 1, 2018, my wife and I arrived in her hometown of Cochabamba, Bolivia, having moved from where we were living in Central PA, so that we could begin work on one of our other dreams – opening our own specialty Bolivian coffee roastery & cafe – ‘Elevate Coffee Bolivia‘.  We’re making slow steady progress on that initiative, and are hoping to have some sort of soft opening for Elevate in June.

And as for FUZZera, an amazing thing happened, and you can read about it here on the May 17 post I published to the FUZZera facebook page.  The short of the long is that I have had an intention to find someone to work with here in Bolivia who could pick up where I left of in February with my FUZZera Jeans prototyping and who could potentially get us into production – AND, I met that someone!  His name is Christian Rocha, and he has his own high-quality custom jeans business (“CR6”) right here in Cochabamba, and we’re already working together on constructing a fifth prototype.  In fact, it could be ready for me to evaluate by next week!

Needless to say, I am very excited to be back up and running with FUZZera Jeans down here in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and I have high hopes.  We’ll see how this next prototyping goes, but I see a few huge advantages of this new arrangement with Christian already:

• He’s local, so each time I get a new prototype, I can meet with Christian and his colleagues in person to discuss any necessary adjustments, ideas, etc, in real-time, and he can make those adjustments pretty much on-the-fly and ready for me to review again in no time.
• He’s already in business producing custom jeans, and that has all kinds of self-evident advantages that I don’t even really need to list out here.
• The cost of producing the prototypes, and eventually production, will be even lower than the arrangement I had with the folks in Italy, and even THAT was a relatively great deal.

A number of very real challenges remain though, especially with the ‘design elements’ that were troublesome for the folks in Italy before, and so we’ll just have to work through them and see what we can do given the various constraints we’ll be facing.

The one thing that I am bummed about is that it won’t be feasible to use the denim that we were going to be using in Italy, which was produced in very environmentally-friendly ways, and was very high quality.  Christian sources his denim from various producers around the world, including Brazil which he speaks pretty highly of, and we’re going to be working hard to find as good a denim as we can find, with an eye on the environmental impact of the denim’s production.

All that said, FUZZera Jeans is back in play, and things are happening.  I hope to be back here on the blog in a few days/weeks with great news and photos and another update for what lies ahead.

Okay, so making jeans isn’t all that simple. Surprise! Not. So, we’re in the 4th round of prototypes now, and it’s been a long, slow haul. The process of producing, QA’ing, shipping (customs!), receiving, reviewing, documenting, communicating, negotiating, re-clarifying, updating, returning (customs!), receiving, pattern-making, grading, producing — wash, rinse, repeat — well, takes time, especially from opposite sides of the planet (Pennsylvania, USA <> Naples, Italy).
Regardless, it IS very exciting to see progress, and the manifestation of an idea take shape. And to be honest, FUZZera Jeans wasn’t even a seductive twinkle-in-the-eye two years ago, and here we are launching a men’s clothing line from scratch. VERY stoked!
As of this moment, I’ve received notification from USPS that the prototype#4 package has been released from Customs in NYC and is on its way to me in PA this very moment, arriving perhaps even today or tomorrow. There’s been some interesting challenges recently in terms of what our friends in Italy will be able to pull off in the factory, since one of the design elements I was really jazzed about turned out to be more difficult (and expensive) to do than anyone thought when we start going down this path many months ago. This 4th prototype will reflect this design not being incorporated into the jeans, and so in addition to the usual review and analysis I’ll be doing with this prototype, the main one will be whether or not I want to move forward into production without this particular design feature. And if not, then I’ve got to pretty much start from scratch and find a production partner who can. Or, maybe, this prototype will look awesome even without the specific design feature I wanted, and we’ll go into production without it. We’ll just have to wait and see.
That’s all I’ve got for now. All’s well, and more updates (and hopefully, inventory!) are forthcoming.
Rock on,
Cliff @ FUZZera

FUZZera Jeans prototype #3 is being produced now, in early August 2017, and we’ll be ramping up production in September/October assuming all continues to go well.  Stay tuned, and check back for more info, placing orders, and signing up for email updates that will include special offers and priority/exclusive notifications.  Keep rockn!