Ebenezer Butterick

Ebenezer Butterick (29 May 1826 – 31 March 1903) was an American tailor, inventor, manufacturer, and fashion business executive, born in Sterling, Massachusetts.

Unless the intended wearer happened to match the size of the pattern, this necessitated manual resizing of the pieces (using paper, or directly on the fabric with wax chalk) before sewing could commence - a laborious and frustrating process.

The patterns were priced at 25 to 75 cents each, depending on complexity, making them an expensive indulgence for the working classes (who typically earned $1–2 per day in 1870 [1]) and out of reach for the truly poor.

The Butterick family began selling their patterns from their Sterling, Massachusetts, home in 1863, and the business expanded so quickly that, in one year, they had a factory at 192 Broadway Street in New York City.

The process that the Buttericks eventually settled on called for the corrected, graded master patterns to be made into thin cardboard templates.

In the late 1890s, the company invented a method of identifying each piece (by means of a letter marked on it in a pattern of small holes), which was patented in 1899.

[3] Around 1905, the packaging of the patterns was changed to an envelope rather than a pasted label, which gave more room for description and sewing instructions, including the first layout charts.