You Won’t Find Sequins Here. Just Dedicated Hands, American-made Fabric, and the Future of PPE Manufacturing.
Rooted in craftsmanship, driven by purpose — this is manufacturing with meaning
When you hear the name “New York Embroidery Studio,” your mind probably goes to fashion — colorful embroidery, intricate beading, high-end designers, glitz and glam. It probably doesn’t jump to manufacturing medical gowns. And yet, at NYES’s Brooklyn Army Terminal facility, that is exactly what we do. Here, garment workers transform massive rolls of fabric and materials into medical gowns, which are then carefully folded and packaged, ready to be shipped out across the country. But how did we get here, what feels like a far departure from high fashion?
As the COVID-19 virus rapidly spread around the world, the demand for PPE surged and vastly outpaced supply, leading to a global shortage. China, the top exporter of PPE products, significantly reduced its exports in the first quarter of 2020 as part of its own response to the worsening pandemic. While the United States maintains a national stockpile of PPE equipment, it was quickly used, and was essentially depleted by April of 2020. Something needed to be done to address the ever-worsening situation.
In March of 2020, New York City officials contacted Feinberg about manufacturing PPE at NYES’s facility in the Garment District. She agreed, and production began. The first nine weeks of production resulted in the manufacturing of 600,000 units of PPE, and was considered a resounding success. In the five years since, the NYES team has made millions of units of essential, lifesaving PPE products, been awarded multiple grants, and expanded into its own facility in Brooklyn.
In 2022, NYES signed a lease for one of the largest spaces in Sunset Park’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, a sprawling 80,000 square foot facility. Here, we produce hundreds of thousands of units of PPE every week, helping to prevent future shortages and restore the national stockpile. The PPE shortages in 2020 highlighted a problem in the United States that this facility seeks to provide a solution for: a reliance on foreign manufacturing for essential goods, rather than creating and maintaining domestic manufacturing facilities. Domestic medical garment manufacturing removes shipping overheads like cost and time, allowing garments to be quickly created and distributed across the country. However, it’s increasingly clear that the removal of these overheads isn’t the only advantage to having domestic manufacturing facilities like ours.
Amid the drastic changes to global supply chains and increased costs as a result of newly implemented tariffs, domestic manufacturers like NYES provide much needed stability in providing goods to American markets and consumers. Being manufactured in the United States means that tariffs will not be applied to the medical gowns produced here at our Brooklyn facility. That’s just part of the benefits of NYES’s gowns. Beyond just being manufactured in the United States, the gowns made by NYES are made from U.S.-made fabric produced in New Jersey. This means that our supply chain is less dependent on other countries and less susceptible to price increases or product shortages that may occur.
We are proud to be manufacturing gowns here in New York, made from materials manufactured in the northeast United States. Manufacturing jobs of all kinds help to boost the domestic economy, providing motivation for workers and their families to stay in the region. When people stay in the area, they spend in the area, investing back into the local economy and keeping their communities vibrant. The northeast, and New York City specifically, have a long history of garment manufacturing, and facilities like ours are helping to write the next chapters in the story.