Minky Couture Blankets Create a Tight-Knit Community

A Minky Couture blanket is a security blanket…and so much more. It is stitched with love, covered with kindness and has created an improbable business success for the company´s owner and the dozens of stay- at- home moms she employs to craft them.

Sandi Hendry’s demeanor isn’t what you would expect from a woman with close to one hundred employees and 5 locations in Utah. She is calm, relaxed and warm. Also confident. She defied the standard logic saying that local manufacturing of textiles in the United States is all but impossible.

At an early age, she knew she wanted to start a business, but her life took a more conventional route and she taught school for 30 years. But 10 years ago her life changed when her 27-year-old daughter suffered liver failure and was hospitalized for five months. She asked Sandi to bring her a soft, cozy blanket. “I could find really beautiful quilts, but they were not cozy. Then I could find baby blankets that were soft but they weren’t big.”

Sandi decided to make her own. Minky fabric (a synthetic microfiber that felt very similar to mink) was fairly new on the market and Sandi had given minky baby blankets as baby gifts. She purchased minky fabric and had a large blanket made for her daughter.

“Everybody loved my daughter’s blanket and would sit by her and borrow it,” Sandi said. “They kept asking where they could get a blanket like that.”

Read the rest at Utah Stories magazine!