Edley Associates, Inc.

Company Profile

Edley is a survival story in American textiles: a domestic manufacturer of the light warp-knitted fabrics — tulle and net — that serve bridal, craft, gift and event markets. The record's detail is in the formats: piece goods for garment and craft trade, fabric doubled and rolled on boards for retail, slit spools of varying widths, wired and unwired ribbons, die-cut circles for party favors and custom sheets for gift-basket wrap. That is a converter-manufacturer hybrid, cutting a basic fabric into a dozen retail-ready products.

Tulle and net look simple but are specification fabrics: hole size (mesh count), stiffness, fiber (nylon or polyester) and width decide whether a net works as bridal veiling, craft mesh or tutu fabric. Making its own yarn and knitting, dyeing and finishing in its own factories gives Edley control of exactly those variables, and its New York base — the record's address is on West Old Country Road in Hicksville, Long Island — keeps it close to the US craft and bridal distribution trade.

Edley's format list is a small museum of American craft distribution: piece goods by the yard, fabric on tubes, fabric doubled and rolled on boards (the bolt format of fabric stores), fabric slit into spools of varying widths, ribbons wired and unwired, die-cut circles for party favors and custom-cut sheets for gift-basket wrap. Each format is the same tulle or net, converted one step closer to its final use. A manufacturer keeping all of that in one New York factory — yarn-making included — could serve a bridal shop, a craft chain and a party-goods packer from the same knitting machines.

Sourcing and Working With Edley Associates, Inc.

Buying tulle and net starts with the mesh: state the application (veiling, overlay, craft, packaging), then the required stiffness and hole size, and ask for swatches in the actual fiber — nylon tulle is softer and drapes, polyester tulle is crisper and cheaper, and they are not interchangeable in a finished product. Colour is the second variable: confirm whether shades are stock-dyed or dyed to order, and the minimum per colour.

The format decision is where this supplier's range pays off — piece goods, boards, spools, ribbons or die-cut pieces each carry different labour in your own operation, so cost the finished format, not the metre price. For wired ribbon and die-cut circles, agree dimensions and tolerances precisely; converted goods are made to your specification, and re-cutting an error is rarely possible inside an event-season deadline.

Understanding the Range

Specialist materials like 'Tulle, net and tricot fabrics, plus ribbons, die-cut circles and' trade on expertise that general mills do not carry. The knowledge that matters — grading, preparation, the quirks of the material in making-up — accumulates in firms that handle one material family for years, and buyers get the benefit of it by asking questions early and specifically. Samples in this trade are not a courtesy but the specification itself: the physical standard agreed at sampling is what production will be judged against, so it should be kept, labelled and referred to in the order paperwork.

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