How a Sensory Parachute Is Made

It takes 8 people, plus me, to make one Sensory Parachute.

Not a factory, not a production line. Eight actual people, each doing one specific part, every single time.

Two tailors. One person printing the fabric. One person on threading and checking. One overlock tailor. One person cutting the fabric. And two people cutting and straightening ribbons. That's 8, before you even count me sitting there designing the thing in the first place.

Every Sensory Parachute has more than 200 ribbons. There's a specialist machine that straightens and seals each one so it doesn't fray, and two people spend their days feeding ribbon into it, piece by piece. Two hundred times, every single parachute.

Every seam is triple sewn. Not because it looks nice on a spec sheet, but because these get held above babies during a class, week after week, and they need to actually hold up.

I could make this faster. I could make more of them, cut corners on the ribbons, skip a stitch line, print somewhere cheaper. I don't want to. I want to make beautiful things, properly, by people, in small quantities, even if that means a design sells out in 36 hours and never comes back.

I get asked a lot whether I can just make one. I get why, but by this point you know why the answer's no: those 8 people, the 200 hand-straightened ribbons, the triple stitching, none of that shrinks down to make sense for a single piece. My minimum order is 25, which is why one-off commissions aren't something I can take on. If your business is looking for something specific made at that scale or more, let's chat. If you're after one parachute for your own classes, explore the current designs here.

This is the slow fashion version of a baby class resource. It was never going to be the fast fashion one.

If you want to know exactly how that's different from the play parachute you might already own, I've written about that here.