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Charitable Ventures



• Project From The Heartclick detail
• Chinese Orphanage Donationclick detail
• Sassy Scrubs Fabric Recycling Helps Outclick detail

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Project From The Heart

Project from the heart grows from factory scraps
Amy Wu, Staff writer, Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester, NY

(December 19, 2005) - Karen Bradley, president of Sassy Scrubs and a seamstress, has found a way to combine business with a cause.

In Sassy's factory, tucked away in a Penn Yan office park, Bradley's team of garment workers hunch over buzzing sewing machines churning out hospital scrubs - and blankets.

The scrubs - Sassy's main product - fuel the company's bottom line, but the blankets feed staff members' spirits.

The Finger Lakes native is the founder of The Baby Blankets for China Project. She and her staff make blankets for Chinese orphanages. It was one way to do good with the mountains of scraps left over from the 30,000 scrubs and other pieces that the manufacturer makes each year.


Recipient of blankets sent in January of 2006

"I didn't want to throw them in the landfill," Bradley said. "So I thought, 'Why not do something good with it?'"

The project is also very personal. Bradley is the mother of two daughters she adopted from China - Chey, 9, and Kenna, 4.

To date, the Sassy crew has sent 300 blankets, 40 bibs, 50 pillowcases and 100 dolls to an orphanage in Fuling, a river town near the city of Chongqing, known for its unpredictable climates and rugged terrain. And despite Sassy's rush to meet holiday orders, there is another package of 170 blankets ready to ship.
This January Shipment will help keep
this darling girl warm.

Sassy staff members use their down time, lunch time and after hours to make the pieces. The children from Chey's Chinese language class help draw faces for the dolls.

"She (Bradley) wants to do some more" for her daughters, said Toni Hobart, a Sassy seamstress. "I thought it was a wonderful idea and very fun. Whenever you had a couple of free minutes, you'd sew it."

The blanket project began soon after Bradley adopted Chey in 1997.

At that time, Bradley's day job was as co-owner of a nursing service in Penn Yan. At night she retreated to her basement, sewing blankets for the orphanages. Over the span of six years, she has made hundreds of blankets for orphanages in China.

She says the trips to Guangzhou, where she went to pick up her daughters, were eye-opening. "Just looking around, you could tell the standard of living that we were used to was not what these folks were living," she said. "The kids in the orphanage have nothing."

In 2003, Bradley bought Sassy Scrubs, which specializes in custom-made cotton scrubs - loose-fitting uniforms typically worn by those in the medical field - that are mainly sold over the Web and have been worn on Discovery Health's Babies: Special Delivery and NBC's ER..

The blanket project has shaped the company's culture, Bradley says.

After seeing pictures of smiling Chinese toddlers grasping dolls and blankets, project time is something that Bradley's workers look forward to.

"At first, they (workers) raised eyebrows. ... (Now) I think they are happy they have something new to do," Bradley said. "I think they are happy about giving back. It makes them feel good and makes me feel good."

At times, the blankets have even taken priority over the scrubs.

"We got slow (in orders) last spring and I didn't want to lay anyone off, so I said, 'I'll pay you to make baby blankets,'" Bradley said with a chuckle.

Blankets are especially appreciated in Fuling, where they are a part of the local culture and are used year-round, said Xia Zhong, charity director for Denver-based Chinese Children Adoption International, which helped Bradley make the charity connection.

Sassy's soft blankets replace the heavy quilts typical in China.

"They (the children) love the blankets. The blankets make them feel like they are at home," Xia said of the children, the majority of them orphaned girls due to China's one-child policy.

Sassy Scrubs is gaining fame for its culture of giving. Sassy's Web site at www.sassyscrubs.com, where there's a "Charitable Ventures" section, gets clicks from people interested in the blankets project, or families who have adopted.

While it's hard to calculate how much impact the project has had on actual sales, Bradley says that the project has breathed life into the business, giving the staff a purpose.

She is now passing her passion to Chey, who recently completed her first blanket. "She loves it," Bradley said. "It's kind of a family thing now."  That blanket will be part of the next shipment to Fuling.


Sassy Scrubs Donates to Chinese Orphanage

It isn't often that a small act on the part of a group of ladies and young girls can have such a large impact on a hundred small children on the opposite side of the world. But that's exactly what happened recently to a small company in Penn Yan, New York, and a group of young ladies learning a new language.

On a slow week in early Spring, 2005, the president of www.sassyscrubs.com, a web-based manufacturing company in this rural town producing custom made hospital and veterinary uniforms, decided to ask her seamstresses to sew up some baby blankets from some excess flannel fabric she had on hand. Karen Bradley was thrilled with the results! Since she is the adoptive mom to two beautiful young daughters who were born in China, she immediately contacted the adoption agency she had worked with through that process.


Chinese Children Adoption International, (CCAI), based in Colorado, suggested that they could provide the name of an orphanage in northern China who could use all the baby blankets Sassy Scrubs could provide. They were very happily surprised by Karen's generous offer and explained that this particular orphanage was in a rural area and not easily accessible to receive shipped goods. The 300 babies and children cared for by this orphanage had only rough wool blankets which were too hot in the summer and itchy in the winter. The receipt of soft, flannel blankets would be very welcome. Through further conversations between the orphanage, CCAI and Sassy Scrubs, it was also determined that the children could also use bibs and pillowcases.

This was all Karen and the Sassy Scrubs crew needed to hear! Using the excess flannel and fabric scraps from their custom scrubs business, they got right to work. The seamstresses hurried through their work each day to get the chance to work on the baby blankets, bibs and pillowcases before it was time to leave. The most gratifying projects, however, were the baby quilts, constructed from fabric scraps, and the cloth dolls.

For the dolls, the crew cut out doll bodies and dresses from the excess fabric pieces. But finding a way to add a face for each doll in a safe way for the children posed a problem. Buttons for eyes could pop off and be dangerous for the young children and embroidery could be picked off the face of the doll by a bored child. Karen decided to enlist the help of her oldest daughter's Chinese Language class.

She purchased fabric paint pens and drew an outline of the doll face on white fabric and took the bundle to class. The girls there were excited to have such a fun project to work on and used their creativity to draw faces, hair and even spectacles on the fabric which was then cut out and sewn onto the doll bodies. This proved to be a very meaningful project for this group of young ladies, all of whom had been born in China and adopted into loving homes.

Once the doll bodies had been matched with their faces and their dresses attached by the ladies at Sassy Scrubs, it was back to class for the dolls! The girls spent another class period stuffing the dolls with fiberfill. Excited voices filled the air as the fiberfill flew and each girl scrambled to find the dolls with the faces she had drawn. What fun for them to realize the dolls they were working on so hard, would soon be hugged and loved by another little girl, far away.

Next, it was time to pack up the items into sturdy boxes to be shipped off to China! In this shipment, this group of ladies and girls produced 26 bibs, 40 pillowcases, 14 quilts, 91 stuffed dolls and 142 baby blankets! Four large boxes soon made their way to the opposite side of the globe to be distributed to the babies and young children waiting in a large rural orphanage.

The most exciting part of this remarkable story is what happened next! The orphanage director sent back digital photos of the boxes being received and opened, and of the thrilled faces of
the little girls receiving their new gifts! CCAI explained that some of the babies are allowed to live outside this orphanage in local foster homes. The families and babies report to the orphanage each month and on this particular month, they were met with new blankets, pillowcases and dolls! For most, these are the only possessions these little ones have to call their own.









Karen Bradley, and the crew of Sassy Scrubs have been so gratified by this project that they already have a stack of baby blankets ready for the next shipment. It has been such a successful program here in this small shop that the employees still hurry through their work to get a few minutes at the end of the day to sew up blankets and other soft surprises, made with love, for the babies on the other side of the world.







Sassy Scrubs Fabric Recycling Helps Out

Since we custom make everything we offer, right here in Penn Yan, New York, we accumulate bits of fabric left from cutting our garments from sheets of fabric. When we cut a garment, the fabric surrounding the pattern is often too small to use, so it ends up in a bag of scraps. We are adamant re-cyclers at Sassy Scrubs, and the idea of sending this perfectly wonderful fabric to the landfill was just unthinkable.

Our solution for the disposal of mounds of scrap fabric which we accumulate is to donate it!

Here are a few examples of what our fabric scraps have become in their next life:

We extend our thanks to the many imaginative organizations who have partnered with us for such constructive and beneficial projects which have touched the lives of many.