Clothing Company Definitions — United States clothing company definitions from Apparel Search
Nelly Don was a clothing manufacturer and distributor through the 1950s, named after its founder, Ellen Quinlan Donnelly Reed. The company was headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, with additional factories in the state. During World War II it made uniforms for women in the military and factories, and underwear for men in the military. Nelly Don manufactured 75 million dresses from 1916 to 1978, and was one of the first companies to apply assembly line techniques to clothing manufacturing.
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The company was headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri and had additional factories in the state. During World War II they made uniforms for women in the military and factories, and underwear for men in the military.
Nelly Don manufactured 75 million dresses from 1916 to 1978 making it the largest dress manufacturer of the 20th century. They were one of the first companies to apply assembly line techniques to clothing manufacturing. It was reported that she only had to dismiss one employee in the entire history of the company.
A documentary film was made about this company titled Nelly Don: A Stitch in Time. Additional information on the film can be found at their website.
The above definition about the clothing company Nelly Don is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The information source is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and was originally obtained from the following page address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Don. The definition has been modified by the Apparel Search Company in June 2009. The rest of this page and other pages on Apparel Search are NOT under the free document license.
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Clothing Company Definitions by Name
The Nelly Don figures describe a scale of dressmaking that belonged to a particular era of American manufacturing. From 1916 to 1978 the company manufactured 75 million dresses, a total that made it the largest dress manufacturer of the 20th century. The company was headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, with additional factories in the state, and it worked as both a manufacturer and a distributor, controlling not only the making of its dresses but their movement out to the stores that sold them.
A central reason for that scale was method. Nelly Don was one of the first companies to apply assembly line techniques to clothing manufacturing. Dressmaking had traditionally been organised around a single seamstress making much of a garment; an assembly line breaks that work into a sequence of specialised operations, each worker performing one step as garments move along the line. Applied to dresses, the technique raises output, makes quality more consistent from garment to garment, and lowers the cost of each finished dress, which is how one Kansas City company could reach tens of millions of dresses across six decades.
The company's employment record was reported as remarkable in a different way: the founder was said to have had to dismiss only one employee in the entire history of the company. Whether read as exact record or company tradition, the claim points to the stable, long-serving workforce on which high-volume garment production depended, since assembly line output relies on experienced operators at every station.
During World War II, Nelly Don turned part of its capacity to the war effort. The company made uniforms for women in the military and for women working in factories, and underwear for men in the military. That mix is typical of how American clothing manufacturers served the war: the same sewing capacity that produced civilian dresses could be redirected to uniforms and basic garments, and women's factory uniforms were themselves a new category as women entered industrial work in large numbers. A dress manufacturer with assembly line experience and multiple Missouri factories was well placed to produce standardised garments at volume, which is exactly what military supply required.
The company remained a clothing manufacturer and distributor through the 1950s, and its full production run ended in 1978, closing the 1916 to 1978 span over which the 75 million dresses were made. The story has been kept in front of new audiences by a documentary film about the company, titled Nelly Don: A Stitch in Time. A film treatment suits this history: Nelly Don brings together a named founder, Ellen Quinlan Donnelly Reed, a single product made at enormous scale, an early use of assembly line methods in clothing, and a wartime chapter, all centred on Kansas City rather than on the New York garment district that dominates most accounts of American dressmaking.
Nelly Don was named after its founder, Ellen Quinlan Donnelly Reed. The company was headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, and had additional factories in the state.
Nelly Don manufactured 75 million dresses from 1916 to 1978, making it the largest dress manufacturer of the 20th century.
During World War II the company made uniforms for women in the military and factories, and underwear for men in the military, alongside its dress manufacturing.