Mel Fashions

Mel Fashions is tucked away in Kalina, over in Santacruz East. We are in D/402 of the Silver Avenue building. It’s a decent area, quite close to the airport and the university, so there’s always a mix of people around. Our space is more of a studio and office than a shop. We spend our time working on designs and managing the production side of our fashion items. The rooms are usually filled with fabric swatches, sketches, and a few sewing machines for making samples. It can get pretty cluttered when we’re in the middle of a new project. We don’t have a big storefront with mannequins in the window. Most of what we do happens behind the scenes. We’ve been in Silver Avenue for a while, and the security guards know us by now. It’s a quiet enough place to concentrate, which is what we need. We are just a few people trying to make clothes that look good and fit right. We don’t really go in for all that high-fashion talk you see in magazines. We just like fabric and sewing. Sometimes we stay late when a deadline is coming up, drinking way too much coffee. It’s a small operation, but we put a lot of ourselves into what we make. That’s just how we’ve always done things here in Kalina and it works for us. We've been here long enough to feel at home and the work keeps us going.