Reprinted from South Coast Today
NEW BEDFORD — A city company that solves other businesses’ problems with messed-up apparel orders, distribution difficulties and warehousing needs has outgrown its South End quarters and is moving to a North End factory recently purchased for $1.65 million.
Darn It! Inc. has grown so robust since it began in the mid-1990s it recently purchased the 314,000-square-foot Fibre Leather Manufacturing building at 630-686 Belleville Ave. The company — whose slogan is “Your problem is our business” — plans to rename it the “Darn It! Building” and spend another $1 million-plus on improvements.
Fibre Leather closed up shop in the city last year and moved its operations away.
Darn It!, which started with a handful of employees, now has 110 full-time workers in 175,00-square-foot rented space in the former Berkshire Hathaway mill off Harbor Street. It will be moving in phases to its new space in the next one to two years.
The move marks a homecoming of sorts for Jeffrey Glassman, president of Darn It!, and his father, Norman Glassman. It was to 630 Belleville Ave. that their relatives first came to New Bedford in the 1930s to work in the apparel business and held jobs at New Bedford Manufacturing Co., makers of pajamas for men and women.