Our 2025
Impact Report
In 2025, Custom Collaborative had our most eventful year yet, serving more than 400 people through Business Incubator trainings, workshops, and community-building events. And across our network of Training Institute alumni, women landed new jobs, earned degrees, and launched new businesses, each building futures we're incredibly proud of.
All Impact Reports
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In 2024, Custom Collaborative was awarded $1.1 million from New York State to renovate our studio and acquire cutting-edge training equipment for our participants and the community to learn on. Meanwhile, we engaged hundreds of people through in-person workshops and strengthened key industry partnerships with top brands like Theory.
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In 2023, Custom Collaborative moved into a 10,000-square-foot facility in the heart of the NYC garment district. This move will allow us to train more people on more equipment, implement more projects on our own timetable, and host events.
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In 2022, Custom Collaborative had a successful year marked by a significant return to in-person activities. Bringing new challenges, exciting partnerships, and creative endeavors, 2022 saw greater community building with participants creating business plans and hiring each other.
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2021 was full of surprises, challenges, and joy. We continued to invest in our participants to build their skills and confidence. While we had hoped to operate at least one in-person Training Institute cohort, the pandemic’s various Greek letters disrupted our plans. We instead capitalized on the “opportunity” of virtual instruction to teach Custom Collaborative’s program participants new skills and provide them with ways to earn money.
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In 2020 the unimaginable happened. New York City, the city that never sleeps, went into lock-down due to COVID-19. Despite many inconveniences and frustrations we persisted, knowing we were fortunate to have a community, a distraction, and a purpose to keep us all going.
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During 2019, we experienced the fullness of opportunities and achievements in our organization. We gained three new members to our Board of Directors and our Training Institute graduated its 5th Cohort. With the expansion of our network, came the expansion of our reach — providing us with new opportunities for growth, partnerships with players from across the fashion industry, collaborations within the community, and adjustments in the fashion system to make room for the impact of organizations with missions like ours, review the annual report from this year.
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In 2018, we experienced exponential growth spanning across all areas of our organization. This year included empowering partnerships led by our Training Institute graduates, our Business Incubator soared, the manufacturing side of our organization began to expand, and so much more, find more specific details and highlights in the annual report from this year.
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Our success in 2017 included the graduation of two cohorts of students from our Training Institute and the launch of our Business Incubator. We continued to provide support to women from low-income and immigrant communities in fashion industry work. There were some important moments to highlight for CC, review the annual report from this year.
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Early support from forward-thinking donors enabled Custom Collaborative to devise and execute a business strategy, and to attract additional donors and partners. Explore the annual report from 2016 to gain greater insight into what this year looked like for CC.