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Peoples Pants

I just set up another server for a side project: Peoples Pants1. The pants thing has been a little idea in the back of my mind for some time and I’m not sure where the name came from. I think it just hit me while running a domain search.  Sometimes I think that maybe I just enjoy setting up servers. Perhaps I’m just procrastinating other work, but given a little free time to dabble and I usually end up with some sorta new side project… either around the house or on the computer. I’m kinda a serial tinkerer and sometimes entrepreneur where my capital is all sweat equity of the time spent ‘behind the machines’.  I just build out the ideas as they come to me. There are a bunch unfinished, quite a few I’ve abandoned, one I’ve sold, and this one now makes two out there floating in cyberspace. I guess it’s the ‘if a tree falls on the internet’ sorta reason for publishing them or posting it here. 

This one got started because while I was building a demo for an upcoming contract and I started using hypothetical pants orders for the models. I might have been thinking about getting some new pants or the pants I had on. Who knows. I had also just read about the legalization of hemp with the farm bill.  And in my opinion, this is something that should have been done a long time ago. I first read about the sustainability of hemp was when a buddy gave me his copy of The Emperor Wears No Clothes2. I was in college. I had just moved from Savannah to Charleston. And for the record… I definitely inhaled. I remember buying a pair of hemp shoes in New Hampshire. They had recycled plastics for the sole and hemp canvas for the upper… like ‘hippy chucks’. Although the shoes are long gone, I currently have two current shirts from Patagonia that contain hemp. The hemp is imported. I’m guessing that this farm bill is going to ramp up domestic production. I think it’d be great if we were to re-invent modern domestic textiles with hemp. Hemp is far more agriculturally sustainable and environmentally friendly. 

Earlier this year, I built a project for a greenhouse environmental control company that does a lot of new business related to the legalization of cannabis. At one time, I starting working up a business prospectus and looking for property for my future greenhouses because, well money…. I’ve toured a facility in Colorado and I had seen that our former state attorney general was getting into the business.  But that’s another story and another business all together even though technically hemp is cannabis. I think hemp is going to be a viable agricultural product and I’m hoping it turns out to be a successful agriculture crop in the states.  From what I remember, part of the introduction to The Emperor Wears No Clothes was about the historic prevalence and uses of hemp in America. I still see a good number of cotton fields in and around the countryside, but I know that the majority of the textile outfits in these area are gone.  I wonder what kind of impact hemp production will have.  

I’ve played with the pants idea in conversation with folks in the past.  I almost always get the ‘you can’t do that here.. that’s why they’re all made in _blank_ third world country’ reply.  I tend to roll through all kinds of those types of lofty aspirations regularly, so I know the context in which the responses from my acquaintances derive. Peoples Pants is ‘pants’ software and it’s one thing to build software on your computer and another set of considerations for how it performs under the weight of users.  These days, I tend to think about scalability from the start because I seem so many good ideas choked off from implementation issues. That’s one reason I spun up a server for this. I like having all of the code modular and the infrastructure in place for high availability.  There is an about page I just wrote for the site and there’s not much more that I need to add here. We’ll see how it goes. I’m sure it’ll take a big chunk of money to ramp up production and at this point is merely a minimum viable product5. Although the software is primarily handling customer service and e-commerce, the idea is that I’m going to build it to handle everything from generating patterns,  passing those to the laser cutter, supply chain management, and human resources.  You can head over to PeoplesPants.com to plug in your email address for updates or check back with me when you need some pants.

  1. Peoples Pants – https://peoplespants.com/
  2. The Emperor Wears No Clothes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_Wears_No_Clothes
  3. Patagonia Hemp – https://www.patagonia.com/hemp.html
  4. H.R.5485 – Hemp Farming Act of 2018 –https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5485
  5. Minimum viable product –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

Updated: 9/16/2020 – I ran into an article today that reminded me of this so I’m just going add relevant links about the sustainability of synthetic clothing to this post.