Splash Fabric - Tracy Krauter

Tracy Krauter - Interview Transcript

So all three boys used to live in a castle right here, we had this multi-tiered castle that they had little bunk beds in and a play space at the top. We have really high ceilings. We've lived here for 35 years. So this room has been many things and this is what it is right now. I am fabric designer and these are all my prints and we make tablecloths, aprons and bags.

Everything was humming along and we started, towards the beginning of the week, hearing about this thing and towards the end of the week, there was talk about putting some blocks on what's happening in the city but no decisions had been made yet. And the next day, they said no more crowds, no more Folk Life. By the next week, they'd shut down the quit show I was gonna go to in Pittsburgh and that was gonna be the end of May. And so, things were starting to really hit the fan. And the week after that, we pivoted to masks because I had this napkin fabric that wasn't being used yet and we had a few hundred yards, maybe 1,000 yards or so of some of my prints and we started making masks out of them and we put them on the website and we offered them to the community and then we had to be sure we could produce.

But we knew we had these sewers that we could start tapping into and the story on the street was that they weren't being employed anymore 'cause all the other wholesalers were bailing on their contracts. So we just stepped in and started hiring anybody we could find. And then the donation piece has continued and we do one for one for every retail mask that we sell.

So we ran out of our napkin fabric and so now we found a company in south Seattle that has an American made brand of fabric that they can get more stock on and so we're just going down there and picking up two or three thousand yards at a time and dropping them off at our sewers. We were like making this huge network that works in the city of Seattle and we didn't even know that everybody was there and available. So it's making us find these connections that we didn't have before.

I grew up in the city of Seattle with a mother who was a social worker and a father who was an urban planner and giving back to the community has always been part of my blood. And so I don't want to gouge people and I want it to be affordable and I want to give as many away as I can. And this affords me the opportunity to do that and that feels good. And my family's down with it. I got all my boys on board and we're making it happen.