Rising Stars: Meet Concetta “Connie” Huffa

Today we’d like to introduce you to Concetta “Connie” Huffa.

Hi Concetta, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My name is Connie Huffa and I’m a Mom, wife, artist, textile engineer, cookbook author, skydiver, inventor, and all-around curious learner that inspires others to build, create, and believe their dreams into products of the future.

Arthur Ashe said,’ Start where you are, use what you have,” and for me, that start was a row house in the Italian Market section of Philadelphia. My family lived across the street from the church, rectory, and convent. From the early days of kindergarten, I learned to walk fast to beat the nuns to my house before their version of the day’s events reached my Mom. I wasn’t a bad kid, just one that asked a lot of questions and wanted to know how things worked, even if that meant taking things apart that, ‘weren’t supposed to be taken apart.’ Little did I know I was also learning business skills like PR, marketing strategy, claim substantiation, the value of integrity, as well as resilience and persistence when told, ‘no.’

On a quiet block of fourteen-foot-wide houses, the tide of a big city relented at the doorstep, when Star Trek came on before dinner and Lawrence Welk wafted through the walls from the neighbor’s at 7 pm. There were few secrets in a row home, and we all liked each other, most of the time anyway. It was a great place for a curious soul to grow up, a Cuisinart of libraries, world-class museums, diverse street art, early American history, science music and writing by the renaissance man Ben Franklin, and Valley Forge where the Continental Army repelled the British but suffered their worst casualties but never surrendered.

The market had food from everywhere on the planet, and of course my tight-knit, lovingly loud, and very extended family scattered over several blocks and multiple ethnicities. Everyone knew everyone and their cousins, in-laws, grandparents, and even relatives in other countries. What lessons in networking, team building, and diplomacy that I took for granted.

One pair of grandparents were tailors from Calabria, who, according to my aunts who taught me how to sew, were so precise in the cut of the fabric and exquisite lay of the seams, they took great satisfaction in taking two-dimensional fabrics, shaping, and forming them into some of the best men’s suits in the city. The other side of my family included two generations of firefighters. So, I don’t think it is any surprise that creativity and courage are in my genes. Given what richness in city culture around me, I followed the words of Arthur Ashe, and blended, art, my love of math, and science into a Bachelor of Science in textile design. This field encompasses all facets of developing products from fiber upward through yarns, weaving, knitting, dying, and printing. Later, I was one of the youngest adjunct professors in the masters of textiles program, at what is now Thomas Jefferson University, where I wrote the class text and mentored numerous people who are now prominent professionals in many parts of the apparel, medical, automotive, sports, and aerospace industries.

Los Angeles became my home in 1987 when I took a huge risk, leaving everything and everyone I loved behind to accept a position with a prominent textile machinery company to help build the knitting industry on the West Coast. Unknowingly, I met my husband, Bruce Huffa, at the same time. Bruce was a British transfer from their office in England and their technical instructor and master engineer for North America.

The two of us ran the entire West Coast office, sales, service, installation, design programming, and customer service, logging 12 hours plus on most days, due to the time difference between the New York office and the Los Angeles customers who worked later due to traffic patterns. For me, coming from such a tight knit community, not knowing a single familiar face for 2500 miles was the weirdest experience in a city of 14 million people. The industry in Down Town LA, with all its yarn suppliers, dye houses, sewing shops, button sellers, screen printers, knitting factories, and interesting characters became our network, our people, and our extended family of sorts.

Bruce and I spent a lot of time together, working all around Los Angeles and our different skill sets made us a great team. We wanted to stay here permanently and put down roots. So, we decided to pool our resources, got engaged, and started to buy a property together. The textile company didn’t like the idea (freaked out) and immediately fired me in January 1988, telling me they ‘needed a man in my position,’ and later fired Bruce who was on a visa, which meant I would lose my best friend and literally my other half.  

The loss was gut wrenching, but with the Philly grit instilled in me by all those who fought tyranny before us and whose shoulders we all stand on, I went to the Los Angeles Registrar’s office the next day and opened a company. Bruce, and I became partners. We lost the house, but later that year we were married, and I gained a best friend forever.

We were both textile engineers, focused on sustainability and zero-waste manufacturing long before it was popular.  We used knitting as additive manufacturing, much like a 3D printer does today. Though, in using textiles, yarns, and strands of materials move, there are so many variables and options. The process is more like tailoring and sculpting at the same time, using a combination of old-world hand processes, much as my grandparents used, and cutting-edge computers, to convert 2D to 3D. We built a complete digital manufacturing system independent of the machine builders, that makes the same product configurations repeatedly and consistently every single time. With the right modifications, the same machinery that is used for basic apparel, can be robotized to automatically make pretty much anything from yoga pants to running shoes, or even carbon fiber panels for electric vehicle composites that are performed to fit the molds. Our technology also integrates dampening materials, insulation, and even anatomically placed ligaments, sensors, and transducers that soothe, and activate muscles.

Our fast startup became Fabdesigns, Inc. in 2000 and is the skunkworks for 3D additive development for many of the big brands and Fortune 100 companies in the worlds of automotive, medical, footwear, architectural projects, sporting goods, and so much more. We dose only the materials needed where they’re required for each performance zone, to build multiple features into the same product simultaneously, and with few or no seams. This eliminates cutting, reduces damaged fabric, and up to 65% of post-production waste that usually ends up in landfills, before we end consumers actually see the products in a store or showroom.

Before it was cool, we used recycled materials and tried to find ways to build recyclability into the products during the design stage in order to close the loop, allowing the products themselves to be recycled. We built digital manufacturing processes that made products with finished edges, meaning no cutting, minimal sewing, and very little waste. In West LA, we worked with Brenda French of French Rags, to build software for her to contemporary women’s wear and an on demand manufacturing system that saved Brenda from making a warehouse full of perishable fashion and stocking only beautiful yarns.  Creating finished garments to shape eliminated many repetitive motion injuries as well as those in the cutting room where more serious safety concerns existed. Instead, we built better jobs with much safer machinery, processes, and better use of materials.

When the economy soured, we were faced with potentially closing the company we fought to build.  Instead, I took a position with Shell Oil, in Moorpark, California, as director of product development in the automotive aftermarket industry, while Bruce kept Fabdesigns going. Shell built my leadership skills, gave me executive training on a global stage, and the opportunity to work with brilliant people. It wasn’t long before I was tasked with building a design team from scratch. I became data-driven creative, blending right and left brain to build fresh products that consumers love to wear, feel and touch. I also became even more of a people person, enabling others to grow their own skills. I found I had the superpower to speak design, marketing, merchandising, operations, and engineering and translate finance to people who are visual. That team reinvented the automotive aftermarket by bringing the fashion of Los Angeles to a dying market.  Together our team and took that division from $100 million to $450 million in 2 years with a better than 65% concept to launch ratio of new products. We brought the fashion district, car culture, film and animation industries of Burbank and Glendale to mainstream big-box retailer consumers. Everything from Sponge Bob to dragons, Hawaiian shirts fabrics, and tribal tattoo art decorated the seats and steering wheels of cars and trucks in the US and around the world, with extensive and innovative textile engineering that had never been done before in automotive.

At the same time, I founded a sustainable contemporary knit label Concetta Bruce under Fabdesigns, when one of Bruce’s knitwear clients in Gardena went out of business overnight, leaving customers and sales people stranded. On the weekends, I was the designer, patternmaker, colorist, graphic designer, and chief cleaning lady. Bruce handled the day to day production, sales people, staff, shipping, customer service, and everything else.

In 2008, the economic bubble hit the automotive world, retail fashion industry, and our small business especially hard. It was then we were introduced to a different kind of client by the same machine builder that fired us years earlier.  This client needed help that the machine builder hadn’t been able to provide. As independent contractors, we pivoted part of our business, and our modified apparel machinery, and used our existing 3D technology to create the Flyknit 3D knit running shoes.  All of this was based on our apparel brand’s fabrics, techniques and our career focus of nearly zero waste technology. Nike loved it, took it and ran with it. This revolutionized the footwear and apparel industries and brought us global attention.

As co-founders of Fabdesigns, Inc. Bruce and I get to speak design, marketing, merchandising, operations, engineering and translate finance to brands startups and individuals who are visual every day.  We provide them expert consulting and prototyping of sustainable advanced projects with nearly zero waste, which is what everyone wants today.   We build transparent supply chains for everything from wearables devices with built-in ligaments, to the next generation of space suits, aircraft and everything in between. Most people don’t even know that what they’re wearing, sitting on, or riding in comes from the technology invented by a small engineering company, here in Los Angeles.

Working with big companies is not easy and there have been unfortunate mishaps due to our naivete in how to protect our intellectual property working with Nike and other companies.  For this reason, I have had to take on additional role of interpreting legal documents, and understanding when to call in expert attorneys, litigators, patent as well as when to say, ‘no thank you.’

A long time ago, Bruce and I realized that it was impossible to build every idea we had all by ourselves in one lifetime. My nature is leading, enabling, mentoring, and supporting others to succeed at what they do best to turn 100,000-foot-level ideas into reality, and Bruce is an innovator, a problem solver, a manipulator of electronics, mechanical and software, who makes some of the most impossible ideas into tangible block busters.

Given our past experiences  in the usurping of our earlier technology in running shoes, we have patented a lot of this technology in the last several years which is the future of sustainable electric vehicle composites, basketball shoes, soccer boots, active wear, wearables, and more.  Our company, Fabdesigns is actively licensing our patents and helping licensees build the products of the future with new ways of making what were once complex things, while adding customization to manufacturing, and creating on-demand products, where no inventory exists until an order is placed.

Over the years, we have given back to Los Angeles in several ways. I am very active volunteering my business and textile engineering expertise to Mayor Garcetti’s Business Development Department, The LA Chamber of Commerce, CMTC (California’s Manufacturing Network), and the Make It In LA Program headed by Krisztina “Z” Holly. During the pandemic, all the connections and ‘extended industry family’ became very relevant in coordinating PPE efforts across the country, translating health facility needs to specifications that local makers could cut and assemble, and fabric makers could supply. I donated hundreds of hours as the hub, chairing an online committee at IPC (Institute for interconnecting and Packaging Integrated Circuits) where I pulled together  academia, testing facilities, fabric suppliers, sewing operations of all kinds, and CMTC and other states’ counterparts across the US, Canada, Mexico, and even the EU with multiple states, local and federal response teams and health facilities in need of PPE, coordinating and initiating efforts.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Honestly, if we were treated well by the machine builder in 1988, neither of us would have thought of starting a business. Life gives us all challenges and it is definitely how we respond that changes the world. We were offered our jobs back and we both refused. We knew the clients were loyal to us and we had the market, and that was the only reason our jobs were offered back, but for how long was unknown. We liked  the freedom of working for the clients and serving them the way they needed, rather than what  a dysfunctional corporation thought they needed from 3000 miles away, and with 3 hours difference.

Starting out, there were internal and external challenges for Bruce and I. Some of the most challenging things have been ‘not knowing what we didn’t know,’ to quote another mentor, Larry Kraines. This is everything from building cash flow to understanding one-sided legal contracts. Thankfully we hired a good CPA at the very beginning who had a lot of patience to answer two 20-something questions.  He looked out for us.

Looking back, it is sobering to realize that if we had taken our jobs back, how many innovations may never have been created, how many jobs wouldn’t exist, how many industries wouldn’t exist, and how taking the safe road would have likely left us unrewarded.  Shell sold the division that I helped drive revenue through the roof to their largest competitor, Kraco Enterprises in Compton.  Any other corporation would have celebrated the success, but consumer products were not Shell’s focus.  Oil and lubricants were. That disappointment pushed me to work for the Kraines family at Kraco in Compton, and then later to build Flyknit with Bruce.  Every obstacle has been loaded with lessons and increased the network of experts and brilliant people that I get to call friends and colleagues.

 It’s true, that with our own company, we were free to pursue the passion of building efficient manufacturing platforms with nearly zero waste, but we had a lot to learn about being in business.  Everything from HR, to OSHA, and the very complex, convoluted, and ever-devolving regulatory system in Sacramento, which treats all apparel manufactures in the state as adversarial oppressors of workers in a way similar to ‘The Minority Report,’ by attempting to legislate bad actors that are usually operating under the radar anyway, while creating red tape and steep hurdles for law-abiding brands to operate.

After working for Shell and Kraco on a very large scale, it was a challenge for Bruce and I to carve up roles and responsibilities, because we were both overachievers. Either we were tripping over each other doing the same things and being overly helpful, without the other knowing, or we dropped the ball trying not to step on the other’s toes. Externally, the world was changing as we were growing, specifically in trade and imports. With the passage of NAFTQA and China entering the WTO, we watched 10% of the factories across the US, Canada, Australia and EU close each year. We picked up projects for medical companies like Don Joy, automotive projects for GM, and an Imagineering project for Disney, which shifted some of our focus outside apparel. We expanded our company beyond the West Coast and deeper into Canada, Australia, and South America.

Other external challenges to our apparel business arose from unexpected tragedies like 911. We had just launched our new custom, on-demand women’s apparel line two weeks before the tragedy, and were forced to shutter it. When Katrina hit in 2005 we’d just had a fantastic show the week before in Dallas, and all the orders were canceled. We lost an entire fall season that year. In 2008 the economic crisis hit many of the 365 high-end boutiques that carried our brand in the US when gas nearly hit $5/ gallon. The lessons we learned from all of these experiences were many.  We had good salespeople, paid them well, and had great customer service. We did not extend credit, since all our product was custom-made for each boutique, which kept cash flow intact and returns to a minimum. We did not factor any receivables to sell  our customers more volume than they could afford.  We also said, ‘no thank you,’ to a lot of the big luxury stores, which probably stunted our growth and press. Working for Shell, I’d learned and understood chargebacks, EDI, returns, and sales discounts and allowances and how retailers used their vendors as profit centers. We kept exclusive to the boutiques instead, which brought higher margins, exclusivity and their loyalty.

On November 9, 2018 the Woolsey fire nearly destroyed us.  Our company leased the barn on Calamigos Ranch Resort for 4 years and if it wasn’t for the Gerson family who had lived through the 1974 Malibu fire, and had since implemented fire systems that connected all the resort swimming pools and trained staff who fought the fire heroically, we would have lost everything.  We later had no power in 2019 for months and our insurance company refused to insure us even with no losses. On January 28, 2020 we moved to Agoura Hills, opened for business on March 15, and were shut down shortly afterwards for the pandemic.

The pandemic was a uniquely devastating situation for Fabdesigns, because we were located here in Los Angeles County. We were shut down. Our clients couldn’t travel to us. Health inspectors showed up policing businesses. Most of our California clients were not in the office.  Innovation is pretty much impossible to do from home and many lost two years  in the projects. However, other places in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Florida were open for business. But how does one transport 2 ton machinery and another ton of materials to work with clients?  It was a lot of FedEx and USPS back and forth.  What should take a day took a month or more without clients in house to touch, feel and make rapid prototyping changes on the fly.

A challenge that we’ve encountered recently is that pre-pandemic, these same big companies that would test our and prototype ideas in a small sandbox like our company, rather than purchasing millions of dollars in equipment and hiring dozens of people over a couple of years, are now internalizing these efforts, or working directly with overseas vendors. Working with us, they get their answers in a couple days to a few months for complex things, and at a fraction of the cost of buying and employing people.  However, working with factories in Asia is free development

Today, in 2022 there is a real drive to pull in all development and keep things in-house to protect their intellectual property and save money by using exclusive vendors in Asia. This is a challenge for our company, since we are typically teaching technology they can’t find elsewhere, as we are building.

This situation as well as recent California legislation may leave Fabdesigns to shift from consulting and making innovative new products to solely patenting and licensing our existing portfolio and working only with licensees. We don’t know, and that is unsettling.

Our clients also liked coming to Los Angeles. We would show them around, and lately, there are a lot of places we have to avoid in downtown, Hollywood, and in the Valley for safety reasons.

Our biggest challenges have always been the California legislation, red tape, and over-regulations that make doing business in California difficult, and now pretty much impossible as a small business, due to cost-prohibitive compliance. Post pandemic this has gotten even more small-business adverse. It’s not that we and others don’t want to do the right things, but the actual compliance requires hiring an attorney, OSHA specialist, and other highly paid professional guidance services like a PEO service that acts as co-employers, and stand to make more income from the business than the owners combined. As businesses recover  from the pandemic, these professional, HR and legal compliance costs are likely more than the profit of the company.

Doing business in California has become beyond burdensome to comply with legislation and regulation that is so out of touch with reality. Companies like ours may be forced not to hire anyone post-pandemic, or be forced out of state after decades of contributing, supporting, and mentoring this business community in Los Angeles. What is worrisome is that these policies are being exported to Washington DC in the form of bills that if adopted will transform US manufacturing in the same way it has been overregulated and stymied in California. We will become a nation of imports and warehouses even more so than Los Angeles is today.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Our business, Fabdesigns, Inc. is unique in the world for its technology in sustainable digital manufacturing and its recent patents (9 in the US and 6 pending elsewhere). I am very proud that Bruce and I sacrificed a tremendous amount of time, effort, and capital to create the next generation of 3D additive textile manufacturing for a whole new generation of designers and engineers to explore in electric vehicles, wearables, ligamental sporting gear, footwear, aerospace composites, and more.

I am most proud of our volunteer work during the PPE crisis where we pulled in every contact, connection, and translated highly technical FDA specifications for PPE, and connected the dots for health providers, sewing facilities, testing companies, academia (NC state and others), and fabric suppliers to accelerate the manufacturing of PPE made in the USA to meet rigorous demands. What precipitated out of that extensive volunteer work to supply working PPE was a civilian mask standard. that improved the CDC guidelines and is now recognized by The WHO and my name and Fabdesigns are on the recognized standard.

During the pandemic, we made costumes for many major superhero movies. This was a lot of fun and we get a kick out of seeing them on the screen and on TV.

It takes a lot of technical and left-brain thinking to manage the engineering and the legalese. To exercise my right brain skills, I am an artist, and a cookbook author, and love skydiving. As an artist, I work in a variety of mediums, oil, acrylics, wood, and found objects and I repurpose post-consumer plastics into art pieces, incorporating them into canvases.

Personally, I’m proud of tackling oil painting, thanks to an inspiring local artist and art teacher Ian Roberts.  Oil painting was intimidating to me, carefully looking at many masterworks at LACMA and even the North Simon in Pasadena,  It is very different from other mediums and I truly enjoy the medium. I’m not fantastic, but it is fun to layer paints and waits between layers and see my skills improve.  I’m most proud of my current work in progress, a landscape painting of my favorite oak tree in Chesebro canyon during mustard flower season. In acrylics, I’m most proud of a canvas that took me months and an uncountable number of layers to complete, called “Fiesta” which is a 36” X 36” abstract fireworks geometric. I also have in progress an acrylic triptych set of abstract paintings of “Napili tide pools.”   What sets me apart, is probably the textures I leave on the canvas. I make art to be tactile, have surface interest, and appeal to more than just the sense of sight.

Recently, I started a series of Cookbooks for college students and new cooks, inspired by my own kid’s adulting, my niece, and nephews starting school, and being away from home for the first time. Cooking is another creative outlet for me and I love competitive cooking. I met one of my best friends at a festival pasta sauce-making competition in Hollywood, sponsored by Jimmy Kimmel. ” There’s a time in life when you wake up and realize you’re on your own and you need to figure out how to eat. if you don’t feed yourself, it will be ramen noodles with Sriracha packets, expensive deliveries, and unhealthy fast food forever.” It’s a book that takes new cooks through making food budgets, how to shop and how to navigate spices and kitchen utensils, from choosing the right pot to what boiling water actually is supposed to look like as opposed to a simmer. The first in the series with 270 recipes from around the world, including vegan and fast-cooking recipes was published on Amazon a few months ago.

We’d love to hear what you think about risk-taking.
After years of being petrified of heights, I’ve faced the fear and skydived at 13000 and then 18000 feet with oxygen. Obviously, that is taking risks. It is an amazing experience, but there is a lot of preparation and education in it before the leap.

In starting our business back in 1988, neither Bruce nor I knew about starting a business. Filing it at the Los Angeles Registrars’ office was the easy part. We were already doing all the labor for other people, so we knew operations customer service, and time management. What we had to learn was finance, credit, marketing, and company vision.

Where were we going? How could we expand, or make more with less? We hired the right mentors in our CPA and later VEDC helped us with a business plan. We self-financed and bootstrapped using our savings and credit cards until we had a good enough track record for a business line of credit. That was hard, but it was worth it, especially when economic downturns surfaced. We weren’t wiped out, and survived by not overextending our finances, nor growing too quickly. We grew solidly and built new skills as we went along.  We made a lot of mistakes. Another quote I appreciate, and one that sums up a lot of our journey is one from Zig Ziglar, “ It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.”  We have definitely bounced back even higher every time.

Like my grandfather and great grandfather who were firefighters, I have the courage to take risks. Also, like them, I prefer educated risks. There is a difference between blind risks and reviewing data to validate my intuition. 

During the last economic bubble, we took the risk of moving us and our company to Oregon in 2010 to help out Nike, using our machines, and were burned by failed promises and I was back in Los Angeles in 6 months. We almost lost our home in Encino when Nike left us high and dry reneging on promises and contracts, and then took our technology without our knowledge or permission. They are still filing patents we never assigned to them to this day. We ‘didn’t know what we didn’t know,’ even with all the data we had as well as signed contracts. Sometimes that happens in life. You meet people or companies that have a different agenda. Lesson learned from a mentor, the late Mr. Charles Frankel, CEO of Loomcraft Textiles: ”a contract is only as good as the character of the signer and the depth of your own pockets to enforce the other party living up to it.”

Pricing:

• $17.95 Cooking 101: From Shopping Cart to Table Tips For College Students and New Cooks: Over 270 Recipes And Tips For Survival on a Budget.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.fabdesigns.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/fabdesignsinc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FabdesignsInc
• Twitter: @concettabruce
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/PgI1obZfIRw
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-101-Shopping-Students-Survival/dp/B0BD2CQGGP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WJZCDX27J3BV&keywords=Cooking+101%3A+From+Shopping+Cart+to&qid=1665498074&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjQzIiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=cooking+101+from+shopping+cart+to%2Caps%2C277&sr=8-1

Image Credits
Santa Barbara Skydive