The Winter I Sewed Two Thousand Blazers in Mthatha

The smell I go to sleep with

People always ask me what my workshop smells like, and I never know how to answer without sounding strange. It smells of raw cotton drill, the kind that comes off the bolt still stiff and a little dusty, and under that there is machine oil, warm and faintly sweet, the smell of the Juki heads when they have been running since seven in the morning. There is a third smell too, scorched steam from the industrial iron when Nomvula presses seams flat, and if you have ever stood in a small room in Mthatha with three overlockers going at once, you know that smell gets into your jersey and stays there for days. My husband used to tease me that he could tell which room of the house I had walked into last because the couch would smell of thread.

I started stitching school uniforms in the back room of my mother's house in 2014. One straight stitch machine, a pair of dressmaking scissors that I still have, and an order for forty grey trousers from a primary school two streets over. I delivered them in black bags balanced on the back seat of a borrowed Corsa. That was the whole business. Me, my mother threading buttons at the kitchen table, and the radio.

How the big one landed

By last year I had four machinists and a proper unit in a rented space near the industrial part of town. Nolubabalo, Zukiswa, Nomvula, and a quiet young man named Sipho who could set a collar better than anyone I have ever watched. We were doing alright. Small orders, steady, a few hundred garments a term, the kind of work where I knew every school secretary by her first name and she knew mine.

Then a procurement manager from a retail group phoned me on a Tuesday. They supply uniforms to a cluster of schools across the Eastern Cape, and their usual manufacturer had let them down badly, late and short and full of crooked hems. Someone had shown them a batch of my winter tunics. Could I produce two thousand blazers and the matching skirts and trousers, delivered in six weeks, before the winter term.

Two thousand. I remember writing the number on the back of an envelope and staring at it. My whole previous year, added up, was not two thousand blazers. I said yes before my brain had finished doing the sum, because you do not say no to a phone call like that, and then I sat in my car in the yard and felt my hands go cold on the steering wheel.

The maths that kept me awake

That night I could not sleep. Blazers are not tunics. They need proper wool blend fabric, canvas interlining, lining, real buttons, and they need cutting done properly or the whole thing hangs wrong on a child's shoulders. I priced the fabric alone and it came to more money than I had ever held in the business account at one time. The retailer would pay me, generously, but only thirty days after I delivered. Delivered. Meaning I had to buy every metre of cloth, every reel of thread, every button, and pay four people to work overtime for six weeks, all of it out of my own pocket, and only see a cent of their money after the last blazer left my unit.

I did the arithmetic again and again as if the answer might change if I were patient with it. It did not. I was roughly ninety thousand rand short of what I needed just to begin. My overdraft was a joke. I lay next to my sleeping husband and thought, with a kind of sick clarity, that the biggest thing that had ever happened to my little workshop was also the thing that could bury it. If I bought fabric on my credit and the payment came late, I would not make wages. If I turned it down, I would spend the rest of my life wondering.

Sitting across from someone who understood the shape of it

My cousin Anele works in accounts for a logistics firm in Gqeberha, and she is the one who said the words to me over the phone while I was nearly in tears. She said, you have a confirmed order from a credible buyer, that order is worth something before it is even made, and there are people whose whole job is to fund exactly this gap. I had genuinely never thought about it. I assumed money only came from banks, and banks, in my experience, wanted to see the past, not believe in the next six weeks.

She sent me a link to read about Purchase Order Funding and told me to stop crying and start reading. I read it twice, standing in my kitchen. The idea was almost embarrassingly simple once I understood it. Because I had a genuine purchase order from a buyer who would actually pay, a funder could put up the money to buy my materials and cover production, and then recover it from the buyer's payment once I delivered. The order itself was the security. Not my house, not a decade of audited statements. The blazers that did not exist yet.

The part where I stopped being ashamed to ask

I will be honest, my first feeling was suspicion, then something close to shame, as though needing help to fill an order meant I was not a real business owner. It took me a few days to get past that. What helped was realising that this is ordinary. Bigger manufacturers than me use it every single term. The gap between winning work and being able to pay for it is not a personal failing, it is just the shape of manufacturing, and there are proper Purchase Order Funding Companies whose entire reason for existing is that gap. I was not the first frightened seamstress to sit at a kitchen table with an order too big for her bank balance.

The arrangement I ended up using worked against my confirmed order. Once the paperwork was checked and the buyer verified, the funds to buy fabric came through, and I could walk into the fabric wholesaler in East London and order everything at once instead of in desperate little instalments. That single change, being able to buy the whole run of cloth in one go, is the reason the job was even possible.

Six weeks of thread and very little sleep

Those weeks were the hardest and the happiest of my working life. We brought in two extra machinists and I taught them our way of doing collars. I bought a second cutting table off a man who was closing his curtain business. The unit ran from six in the morning until nearly ten at night, and I made a pot of samp and beans every day so nobody worked hungry. Sipho set two hundred collars and never once complained. Nomvula pressed until her wrists ached and we rubbed them with Zam Buk at the end of each shift. There was a night the power went out during load shedding and we finished a batch of hems by the light of two paraffin lamps and my phone torch, laughing because there was nothing else to do but laugh.

I checked every single blazer myself before it was folded. Every button, every buttonhole, every lining. I would not let one crooked seam go out of that door, not when this order was going to decide whether my people had work the next year. Understanding how the Purchase Order financing actually got recovered from the buyer's payment made me calmer through all of it, because I knew that if I simply delivered good work on time, the money would settle itself in the right order and nobody would go unpaid.

What it felt like to hand it over

We delivered on a Thursday. Two thousand blazers, plus the skirts and trousers, loaded into a hired truck, every box labelled by school. I stood in the empty unit afterwards, and it was so quiet without the machines that my ears rang. The floor was covered in a soft grey fluff of drill offcuts. I sat down on an upturned crate and I cried, properly this time, but it was a different crying to the kitchen at midnight.

The payment came in on time. The funding was settled, the fabric was paid for, and for the first time my four machinists got a bonus that actually meant something. Zukiswa put a deposit on a fridge. Sipho enrolled for a part time course. And I slept, a whole night, the smell of cotton and machine oil still in my jersey, no arithmetic running behind my eyes. The next term the same retailer came back with another order, and this time I was not afraid of the size of it.