Michelle Feinberg has spent her career keeping skilled garment work alive in New York City. Trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she rose through the city’s last great embellishment houses before founding New York Embroidery Studio in 2003, today the last remaining embroidery and embellishment studio in New York’s Garment District. For two decades, her team has hand-finished runway and red-carpet pieces for the most demanding names in American fashion.

When the pandemic shut down the fashion calendar, Feinberg refused to let her craftspeople go. She turned the studio’s machines, and its hands, toward something the country urgently needed: medical-grade protective equipment for frontline workers. That decision became NYES Protect, American-made PPE built by the same skilled workforce, held to the same exacting standards as couture.

Today, NYES Protect manufactures isolation gowns, masks, and protective apparel for federal, state, and healthcare partners from its operations in New York, proof that protecting people and protecting American manufacturing jobs can be one and the same mission. The craft that built New York Embroidery Studio now stands behind every garment NYES Protect ships.