Bringing London to Los Angeles: ABC Sewing Machine at the Burberry Fashion Show

ABC Sewing Machine recently partnered with luxury fashion house Burberry for a night of style, music, and quintessential British elegance. Held last April at the iconic Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California, the event showcased Burberry’s LA Runway Exclusives as well as its Autumn and Winter Collections for 2015.

Our team was very excited to become a vendor for a major fashion event for the first time. Although we have catered to various popular TV shows and big-name studios like Warner Brothers, Disney Channel, and Universal Studios in the past, the Burberry event was something new for us. We were more than happy to share our industry expertise to what we heard was the British brand’s first big show in the City of Angels.

When we got to the event venue, we were welcomed by a path lined with Union Jacks and American flags. They also set up a manicured English Garden filled with English roses and lavenders in full bloom. The garden was bordered by hedgerows and a beautiful set of wrought iron gate with golden filigrees. There was simply no effort spared for the impressive show.

While our team was setting up our sewing machines in the shop, we met with the head of the atelier, who gave us specifications for each machine to be adjusted for certain types of fabrics and threads. It was really nice to meet someone from the industry who understood this as well as we did. You see, sewing machines, especially the industrial varieties, need to be fine-tuned for specific types of fabrics. For instance, lycra, silks, and light knits require very different settings from denim, leather, and canvas. Others might say, “oh, the machine will do just okay if you don’t do that,” but with a fine tune, the stitch quality can really be so much better. In a setting like a fashion show where the devil really is in the details, this fine-tuning ability makes a big difference.

Ensuring that the shop ran like clockwork was very important for the success of the event as well. With the sheer number of garments and dresses Burberry needed to finish before the runway show, we had to make sure that the machines ran perfectly before the event was in full swing.

One of the biggest hurdles we encountered was the lack of electricity available to run the sewing machines at the optimum. The location for the fittings and alterations was not really a sewing factory, and there wasn’t enough power to go around. The solution we thought of was to swap 95% of our units at the show with energy-efficient and eco-friendly sewing machines with servo motors. This way, we were able to cut down on our power consumption, running an equivalent of four servo motor sewing machines with an amount of energy that would have powered only one clutch motor sewing machine.

We were really happy to have received positive reviews on the quality of our machines, the service in and out, as well as the extra service we provided by leaving a senior sewing machine technician on site to make sure there was never a machine down.

Between the celebrity arrivals, the guest musicians’ performances, and the drumbeats of the Grenadier Guards, the highlight of the Burberry fashion event was, of course, the staging of the runway shows. The shows were really beautiful, with all the models going down the runway wearing all the dresses that were finished and fitted for each one of them.

All of these made us really proud of the work we do and of the way we work as a team. We weren’t the ones who designed the clothes or anything like that, but our sense of pride comes in knowing that the artists were able to accomplish their amazing work with the help of the sewing machines we provided.