Paul Cavazza Explains Grading. Part 3

Grading isn’t taught as part of academic fashion education, but a skill, Cavazza observes, that most companies today will teach hands on, training within the company. When someone comes to Cavazza interested in being a grader, the first thing he asks is: “Do you like math and fractions? If you don’t like that, and puzzles, you’re not going to like grading. That’s what graders do- they look at a garment, and they need to make it an inch bigger or smaller, they have to divide that by the garment’s parts, all day long.” Something as simple as 5/8ths of an inch can change the proportions of a garment, and wind up costing, or saving a company thousands of dollars across a line of garments. Cavazza recalls that graders used to be engineers who worked with numbers and math.

To illustrate his point, Cavazza shared a story about a women’s clothing company, who insisted that he use the specs they had given him, to grade a garment from the size four sample all the way up to a size 24. By the time the garment went from a size 8 to a 10 to a 24, he said “the lapels had gone crazy!” The proportions were all wrong for a woman’s jacket. To show the tech designer what he saw from a grading perspective, he had a sample made up in muslin, according to the size grade. Once she could see it in front of her, the tech designer went back to her calculations, and saw where a small mathematical error had made the proportions go wrong.

Where a grader used to be someone in-house, or part of a grading and marker’s combined business, some companies today contract with Cavazza strictly for grading. Actual manufacture takes place overseas. E-mailing spec sheets, the cutter’s musts and scanned patterns back and forth makes that possible. Because technology can connect different aspects of the fashion industry across distances and time zones, strong communication and problem solving skills are even more essential for pattern markers and graders like Cavazza, working to track down the numbers and details that keep the company’s consumption economical.

“Could be the next Marc Jacobs”- Paul Cavazza on customer service. Part 4

Tags: Create-A-Marker, fashion terms, grading, Paul Cavazza

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 10:00 AM and is filed under Interview, Tech Design, Vendors and Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.