Finding Fabric in a Changing World

For as long as I've been designing, finding the right fabric has always been part treasure hunt, part relationship-building. I'd travel to trade shows, walk the aisles, run my hands over bolts of silk, wool, and linen, and talk directly to the weavers, dyers, and importers who brought them to life. That's how I built my line — one bolt, one conversation, and one gut feeling at a time.

That world is disappearing, and lately I've had to reckon with what comes next.

Where the Fabric Used to Be

Seattle used to host its own fabric trade shows. I could drive downtown, spend a day among wholesalers, and come home with exactly what I needed for a season's collection. Those shows are gone now.

Further south, the Los Angeles CaliforniaMart once had five entire floors of fabric wholesalers, with trade shows twice a year that drew designers from all over the country. San Francisco still holds a fabric trade show every November, but even that has shrunk noticeably over the last five years — fewer vendors, smaller floors, and far less to see.

At a certain point, I had to ask myself honestly: is it still worth the cost and time of traveling to these cities when there's so much less waiting for me when I arrive? Increasingly, the answer has been no.

The Pivot to Buying Online

So I've had to pivot to buying fabric through websites instead — and here's the strange part: many of these sites are run by the very same wholesale vendors I used to order from in person at those trade shows. Their business hasn't disappeared so much as it's changed shape. They no longer travel to shows. They sell directly online now, often at retail prices, to whoever finds their site.

I want to be honest about what that shift has actually meant for me, because I don't think enough people talk about it.

Buying fabric from a photo and a paragraph of text is genuinely hard. I can't feel the weight or hand of it in my fingers. I can't see how it actually drapes on a body — not in the way a photo staged under studio lighting shows it. And colors — colors are the hardest of all. What reads as a soft dusty rose on my screen can arrive looking like a completely different shade in person. More than once, I've had to send fabric back that, despite an accurate-sounding description, simply wasn't right for my line. That return shipping comes straight out of my own pocket, every single time.

Then there's the question of who these websites are really built for. Many of them were designed with home sewists in mind — someone making a single garment for themselves — not a working designer who needs consistent yardage, season after season, to build a cohesive collection. That mismatch shows up in small, frustrating ways: strict quantity limits, minimums that don't quite work, and high-quality fabric that's simply not offered in the volume a small clothing line actually needs.

And on top of all of this, fabric prices have risen sharply. The same tariffs and trade disruptions that have reshaped global supply chains have driven up the cost of materials across the board — meaning even when I can find what I'm looking for, I'm often paying significantly more for it than I was just a few years ago.

One loss I feel especially keenly: I used to source some of my most beautiful fabrics from Canada. The quality was exceptional and the relationship felt close to home. But with the added tariffs now applied to Canadian goods, that simply no longer makes business sense. Those fabrics — and that sourcing relationship — are gone for now, and it's a real creative loss.

Making Lemonade (and Working with What We Have)

So I've had to sit with a real question: how do I stay in business when I love creating, but the raw materials I've built my whole practice around have become this hard to find?

With brick-and-mortar fabric stores closing on top of everything else, here's where I've landed, at least for now. I'm pivoting toward taking existing quality pieces and transforming them through restyling, hand-dyeing, and custom techniques, while also expanding into more accessory-focused pieces built around processes I can still fully control — even when the global supply chain is out of my hands.

Take the outfit I'm wearing above. It started as a basic white sweatshirt. I completely restyled the silhouette, gave it a rich hand-dyed chartreuse bath in my studio, and paired it with one of my custom eco-printed silk scarves. It’s practical, vibrant, and completely unique — a direct result of adapting my process to what’s available.

To be completely honest, there is still basic leftover fabric yardage left in my studio, but no glamorous or interesting new fabrics will be added to the line for the time being. We simply have to brace ourselves until November and hope that peace will return, the tariffs will disappear, costs will stop rising, and small businesses like mine will finally get a break.

This isn't the plan I would have chosen if the world had stayed the way it was. I'm staying open to the possibility that policy and trade will shift again, that these tariffs will eventually ease, and that trade shows will one day offer the kind of quality, connection, and volume they used to. I hope for that, genuinely.

But that isn't the world we're living in right now, and I've realized I have two choices: stop, or make something worthwhile out of what's actually available to me. I'm choosing the second one.

Where This Leaves Me

I'm not sharing all of this to complain — I'm sharing it because it's the honest, unglamorous reality behind every piece you see in my shop right now. Every scarf, every top, and every hand-finished piece has a story that starts long before I ever cut into fabric: a story of searching, of guessing based on a photo, of sometimes getting it wrong and starting over, and now, of reimagining what handmade even means for my business.

If you've ever wondered why certain fabrics show up in limited quantities, or why a particular print never comes back once it's gone — this is why. I'm working within a supply chain that looks nothing like it did even five years ago, and I'm figuring it out, one piece at a time, right alongside you.

Thank you for supporting small, handmade businesses like Engayla. Your support matters more than ever.