Cosawove Workwear

Lisa Hutson grew her entrepreneurial passion while raising her 5 children – including cooking, chauffeuring, helping with homework and designing and sewing their clothing. HiViz Custom Outfitter LLC and its brand Cosawove™ Workwear became the vehicle to realize her dreams of establishing a successful business and making valuable contributions to her community. “We started our certified women-owned business in my basement in Sunman, Indiana,” she said. “Our original equipment was down there. My office was down there. It was my manufacturing facility. It was everything.” When her application for an MRG to support advanced garment printing was approved, the company moved from the basement to the garage to accommodate the growth. Cosawove operated out of this space until relocating once more to a purpose-built Batesville, IN facility. What is now home to more than 7,000 Hoosiers, the city of Batesville originally passed from government to private hands in 1837 and by 1867, had begun its journey as a manufacturing hub for furniture, coffins and novelties.

Cosawove became a welcome addition to Batesville’s manufacturing history, producing custom uniforms, apparel and promotional items with a focus on women working in skilled trades and on manufacturing floors. Their core value proposition is custom designing and manufacturing quality workwear for women in traditionally male dominated jobs. The company’s “Women’s Workwear Initiative™” provides items designed and created for women, including high-visibility wear, fire-retardant clothing, personal protective equipment — even maternity wear and shirts for nursing mothers. Customers can purchase items through Cosawove’s online and retail stores and, in some cases, directly through their own corporate employers.

Cosawove’s growth continued in the spring of 2024, when Lisa contracted to purchase two additional buildings in downtown Batesville. These legacy properties previously housed manufacturing companies with histories reaching into the region’s past. Lisa plans to expand CosaWove’s business operations there while she initiates her passion projects with deep community connections. In these spaces, she plans to coordinate internship programs through the State Department of Labor and host training for culinary arts, hospitality and early childhood education. Her vision is one of a multipurpose destination site for residents and tourists, complete with shops and residential units. Ambitious? Yes, but the rapid and continued growth of Cosawove is an indicator of Lisa’s drive, determination and expertise.

The MRG program was vital in helping Cosawove source and configure the key components of its advanced manufacturing commitment: a suite of equipment including an industrial two-station Direct-to-Garment (DTG) printer, a conveyor belt dryer to cure the ink on garments, a pretreatment machine and a multi-head commercial embroidery machine. These pieces of equipment are digitally interconnected through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), resulting in several automated and predictive services that enhance the entire garment production process. Printers order their own ink, machines perform self-maintenance to avoid ill-timed shutdowns, and live feedback notifies the operator of any mechanical or process issues. The equipment also contains several environmental sensors that automatically make real-time adjustments for humidity and temperature, and specialized IIoT software aids in visualizing what is now a tightly-knit operation.

As a start-up, investigating equipment and technology upgrades fell to Lisa as the founder, who best understood the company’s trajectory and what was needed to take that next step. “Before this project, we were completing 6 t-shirts an hour and embroidering 3 hats an hour,” Lisa said. “With our original equipment, we were unable to complete our contracts for economically disadvantaged women-owned businesses because large orders had to be out-sourced. But the new equipment allows us to cut material costs from several dollars to pennies and increase production from 6 units an hour to 100,” Lisa explained. “Production costs per shirt are cut in half, and our finished product quality is significantly improved. Plus, the IIoT system provides real-time custom sorting solutions and integrated packaging and shipping, impacting our operations well past the manufacturing stage.”

Cosawove’s niche focus, combined with their expanded production capabilities and problem-solving tendencies, has led to exclusive business developments. Lisa pointed to collaboration with Cargill, Inc. as a clear example of this. She frequently overheard that Cargill’s workforce had unsatisfactory fire-retardant workwear – the material was too heavy and offered limited breathability, occasionally resulting in heat fatigue for the wearer. While attending a convention in Portland, Lisa connected with DuPont suppliers and learned about a new material of theirs that could potentially provide the same fire resistance in a much lighter package. A few conversations later, Cosawove and DuPont are collaborating to design, fabricate and test prototype shirts from the new material that they’re optimistic will be the new cutting-edge in fire-retardant workwear. “It’s something that we can do – we’ll be the only ones making this shirt the way that it needs to be done,” mentions Lisa.

The duo are also working together to provide an environmentally friendly solution in the workwear space. Cosawove is well-established in existing production, having won the contract as the sole source for maternity uniforms for Cargill’s plants worldwide. Following this, one of Cargill’s affiliate companies, Ardent Mills, then approached CosaWove to contract all its women’s workwear lines across the globe. “I have a passion for bringing quality products to every customer,” Lisa added. “Making an impact in someone’s life by bringing simple joy through a quality product makes my work more than just a job. It’s a way to make the world a better place.”

Lisa’s values begin with the Cosawove workforce. With just 4 employees on the payroll at the time of Cosawove’s MRG application, one thing was top of mind: the growth enabled by the project would need to positively impact the community and her employees. As production volume increases with the MRG-supported manufacturing equipment, newly created jobs will result in full-time employees enjoying specific on-the-job upskilling and full benefits.

Lisa found that “too many cooks can spoil the broth” is more than a catchy idiom. Involving key staff who know how business processes must flow for maximum efficiency is, in itself, an efficiency. “We initially had some outside software help for optimizing and interconnecting our new equipment,” she recalled. “But 5 months in, they still hadn’t delivered anything. We knew we had to get this right, because we couldn’t start over again.” As a small business without an engineering or tech staff, she tapped her operations manager to work with her in determining exactly how the software needed to integrate with Cosawove’s processes. “We realized we literally had to do it ourselves. We started with sales and figured out how to fulfill our orders and build everything from scratch as if it didn’t exist before. We probably could have found someone with the technical ability to accomplish the programming but getting that person up to speed on our processes would have taken more time and effort than doing it in-house.” The better solution, she determined, was to build a small internal team who were knowledgeable about Cosawove’s processes and how they should operate for maximum efficiency and quality success.

“I’m always willing to learn. One thing I’ve learned is that over-hiring isn’t the best solution. Going up and down in the number of people on staff resulted sometimes in having too many people on staff. But the good news is that the new technology from this project didn’t replace anyone. If we’re going to manufacture apparel in the United States, we have to pair people with automation,” she explained. “We’re competing globally with manufacturers who are paying pennies on the dollar to make clothing somewhere else where market conditions are vastly different from here,” Lisa said. “We can compete, but we have to be innovative about it.”

“I’m definitely purpose-driven,” she said. And her purpose centers on women — especially women with children — struggling with the gap between wealth and poverty. “That’s real,” she said. “They cannot afford childcare, and without childcare, they cannot work. For me, it’s not just about recognizing the problem, it’s about finding and contributing solutions to that problem. That’s a true, lasting impact on the whole community.” She looks at the barriers to solutions and considers how she can help tear down those barriers. “To do that, I have to focus and make sure Cosawove is on good, solid financial ground. We are women’s workwear. People say we can’t be everything to everyone, but it wasn’t until we figured out who we are, what we are good at and what our direct purpose is that we realized the impact we could make here at home. It’s women, women and women.”

“Our journey has led us to understand that this problem is not just local. On a business trip in Paris, we found people with the same ‘local’ concerns. Inclusivity. Equity. Working mothers. We can make an impact right here at home. We take care of men, too; we have quality workwear for men, but our focus began and continues to be making workwear custom designed for women and their special needs — like maternity workwear.”

Although European nations have courted Cosawove to relocate its manufacturing facility, that’s not something Lisa wants to do. Instead, while she works to expand Cosawove’s market reach, she continues to prioritize the United States in general, and Indiana in particular – working to build the company so that its success can impact solutions for women and children in the Batesville community.