Fabric samples, round one
Eleven swatches from four suppliers. Two are good, one is very good and too expensive, and one shed on my hands.
Eleven swatches arrived this week from four suppliers. I've had them on the desk for six days now, picking them up at random intervals, which is a genuinely useful test — the first impression of a fabric and the sixtieth impression are different impressions.
What I was looking for
Not softness. Everything in this category is soft, and past a certain point softness stops being a differentiator and starts being the reason it feels cheap — that slippery, too-shiny hand you get from low-grade polyester pile.
I wanted density, and a short pile. Fabric with weight to it, that doesn't flatten permanently where you've held it, and that reads matte rather than glossy under a bedside lamp. Nothing shaggy — long-pile "fun fur" sheds, and a thing you press against your face shouldn't leave part of itself behind. In practice that means velboa or a minky at 3.5 mm or under. The difference between a $25 object and a $65 one is visible from across a room and it's mostly this.
Results, briefly
Two are good. Both from the same supplier, both within budget, both fine.
One is very good and comes in at nearly double the cost of the two good ones. It recovers from compression almost completely, it's properly matte, and picking it up feels like picking up something that cost money. I keep going back to it, which is the whole signal.
One shed on my hands, which ends that conversation.
The decision I'm sitting on
The expensive one moves the shell cost enough to push the retail price up by roughly ten dollars, or to take that out of the first run's margin, which at this stage means taking it out of the number of units I can afford to make.
I keep coming back to the same argument: the design is the product here. Nobody is paying a premium for a warm bag of beads — you can buy a wheat bag for eleven dollars. They're paying for an object that doesn't look like a compromise. And the fabric is the entire object as far as your hands are concerned.
I think I'm going to spend the money. I'll write up the actual decision, with the numbers, once the second round of samples is here.