10,000 Garments Later: How The Massing Group Answered the Palisades and Altadena Fires

The Palisades Fire ignited on the morning of January 7, 2025, in the hills above Pacific Palisades. Within hours, a second fire was burning 30 miles east in Altadena. By the time both were extinguished, they had destroyed 16,246 structures combined, according to Cal Fire data reported by the Associated Press. Whole blocks of Altadena were gone. Families who got out with a go-bag, or with nothing at all, needed clothes and shelter before they needed almost anything else.

The Massing Group, the Los Angeles manufacturing and development company Benjamin Massing has run for years, had something most relief donors didn't: a working factory with raw material inventory already on hand. That difference shaped how the company got involved, and what it was able to do once it did.

The Massing Group started the response with raw fabric on hand and a cutting floor still running, which meant it could produce garments and blankets to match whatever was being asked for that week.

Instagram Made the First Move

In the days after the fires, much of the grassroots relief effort organized the same way, through shared donation lists and real-time posts rather than any centralized system. Massing traces the response back to two things arriving at once: donation centers posting real-time needs on Instagram, and a call from someone who already knew what was sitting in the company's Los Angeles facility.

"We saw outreach from donation centers making headway on Instagram, and we decided to work through those channels, as well as a friend and former employee Alexis Fabie reached out knowing the kind of inventory we had," Massing said. "So it became a goal to work with some of our major brands like Tribe Kelley and Form, and they were all onboard."

The company didn't open its doors to a general donation drive. It worked through people who already understood its production capacity, then brought in brand partners who could move quickly because the relationship and the manufacturing infrastructure already existed. Nobody had to explain what the Massing Group could make or how fast it could make it.

Blankets First, Then Whatever Came Next

The earliest need was warmth.

"Sometimes the needs would shift, they would need more bottoms or tops or outerwear," Massing said. "At the beginning of this, they needed blankets, so we cut thousands of yards of fabric that we had in inventory to help make blankets for people and their pets."

That's a specific kind of response. A retailer sitting on finished inventory can donate what it already has in stock. A manufacturer with raw material and cutting capacity can make what's actually needed, in whatever form the need takes that week. When the ask shifted from blankets to bottoms, tops, and outerwear, the Massing Group shifted with it. The same fabric and the same cutting floor could be redirected toward a different garment without waiting on a new supply chain.

The response ran on the company's ordinary manufacturing process, aimed at a different kind of order.

Why Skipping the Open Call Worked

Clothing donations became their own complication in the weeks after the fires. Major relief organizations, including the American Red Cross and Direct Relief, publicly asked donors to stop sending unsorted clothing, warning that sorting and distributing generic donations pulled resources away from more urgent needs and that clothing sized and styled for no one in particular often went unused.

The Massing Group's approach sidestepped that problem structurally. Because the company worked through donation centers that were already coordinating on the ground, and through brand partners with a direct line to who needed what, the goods it produced were matched to a stated need before they were made. Blankets went out when blankets were the ask. Garments followed once the need moved past emergency warmth and toward getting people re-clothed for daily life.

It's a version of the same infrastructure Massing has built the company's retainer business around: raw materials on hand and relationships close enough that a request doesn't need to be explained twice. Massing has described the appeal of domestic production in similar terms before, as the difference between sitting at the table and being in the kitchen where the work actually happens. In January 2025, that same kitchen ran toward a fire response instead of a brand's next collection. The mechanics were the same either way.

Nothing Had to Be Built From Scratch

Every piece of this response already existed inside the company before the fires started. The fabric was already in the building. The cutting floor and sewing teams were already staffed and running. The relationships with brands like Tribe Kelley and Form already existed before the emergency began.

That's the same infrastructure the company sells to emerging brands on retainer, the reason a sampling process that takes most independent founders two years takes Massing's clients two to two-and-a-half months. In an emergency, the value of having that infrastructure already built and already warm showed up in a different form. The decision that mattered was simply where to point it.