It starts with raw materials: natural ones like cotton/wool/hemp and chemical compounds for synthetics: polyesters, rayon, lycra, etc.

There’s a whole lot of work that happens harvesting, cleaning and transporting the materials, but the next critical step is spinning. That’s right, it’s not magic, fibers still have to be spun into threads before fabrics, trim or anything more complicated than a single strand can be made. They must do a lot of delicate sorting work (sometimes automated, sometimes by hand) to keep the best fibers together and sort the other qualities. In America, these mills generally focus on American grown cotton or virgin (first life cycle) polyesters. In a place like India, the range is far greater and there’s more nuance in sometimes being able to harvest unusual fibers in labor intensive (environmentally better) ways. Both American and Indian mills are struggling for survival and seem to be coming up with the same solution: vertically integrated manufacturing. Spinning mills have to buy from suppliers and then sell to other mills up the supply chain who create knit or woven fabric.

From the Economic Times of India:

A comparative analysis of the financial performance of standalone spinning companies pitted against vertically integrated (healthy mix of fabrics and garment) textile companies showed that net profit of vertically integrated companies has grown at a CAGR of 35%, while standalone spinning companies have a CAGR of 28% in their net profits in the last five years.

This shows that a concentrated focus on the higher end of the value chain of the textile business is a lucrative strategy even in times of a slowdown in the business.

Vardhman Textiles is a case in point. In the last three years, the contribution of the fabrics segment to its total revenues has grown at a CAGR of 35%, while its revenue from the yarn segment has grown at a CAGR of 20%. This shows that the company is expanding its capacity in the fabrics segment.

Going ahead, an increasing focus on fabrics and garments would help spinning companies retain their margins. Garmenting and fabrics segments by their very nature of business demand less capital compared to the pure spinning business.

But why this reversal trend in moving away from the segmentation of labor and skill? Doesn’t everything work more efficiently if individual tasks are performed perfectly and in isolation to reduce complexity in order to perfect specific skills/process? Isn’t the key large scale? It’s funny to me that this reasonable, if completely outdated idea of economics and the human experience, is not yet completely debunked. Things relate to each other. One aspect informs another. Creativity happens when more than one thing is put next to another thing and the human mind synthesizes something new.

From the complete vertically manufactured American facilities that can do everything from spin yard, weave/knit fabric, dye/print, design/pattern, sample and manufacture large production runs (there are VERY, VERY few of these), to International companies like ZARA that limit manufacturing to the area between Spain-North Africa (so they can produce ‘relatively’ small runs and control inventory/quality without the large forecasting that happens when you manufacture something really far away, like Asia) to these small South Indian spinning mills beginning to produce their own fabrics. Scale is now more ‘context’ than ‘process.’

But that’s a path with more consequences than progress.

Beyond hurting local communities, economies and livelihoods, it delays what really needs to happen: things need to get more expensive and more local if we want to move towards sustainability on a human and environmental basis. That’s not what anyone wants to hear. “Buy less and pay more!” sounds like a lot of people’s worst nightmares. But on the other end of it, higher pricing means consumers will be demanding more from their purchases. Was it responsibly sourced and ethically produced? Will it still be a durable, beautiful addition to my wardrobe in a few years’ time? It should be. The trick is not to buy more or produce more, but to so so more consciously. It’s been my great pleasure in the last year+ to see major international companies begin to embrace sustainability, and almost universally this is being enacted because of a personal sense of duty, but after the fact justified by financial savings, such as reduced water costs.

“One example is Roger Yeh, President of Everest Textile Co Limited who has pioneered the Everest Sustainability Moel (ESM) that now guides the development of the business. Yeh admits that although a few customers approached Everest regarding environmental issues, it was not until he has a personal realization about the risks to his business and the planet of unsustainable industry, that the idea for ESM took hold.” -EcoTextile News January 2012

Thankfully, there are a few things that should be kept in mind when moving ahead to a bold and positive future.

There are things that industry can do:

1. Create 2 tiers of wholesale: 1 for online retailers and another for brick and mortar to reflect operational costs. It’s in everyone’s best interest for women to be able to see your products in a beautiful space, try them on with the help of a great salesperson and come away with the joy of a purchase that pays local taxes.
2. Support certification and promotion of new technologies, fair trade and ecological innovations.
3. Retool the design and production standards to reflect values of sustainability and durability.

There are things that consumers can do:

1. Shop locally.
2. Ask about how something is made or where it comes from.
3. Pay attention and be strongly biased in favor of organics, innovation and fair trade.
4. Be willing to pay more and shop less for garments that will last.
5. Love what you buy.

Well, sort of.

A few decades ago “made in China” meant something else. The apparel industry, always searching for the lowest bidder became the connection for China’s new economy based on massive factory production and stent into hyper drive with preferred economic partner status in the 1990′s. China, unlike many other countries has no minimum wage. The skilled labor in creating a garment in NYC’s fashion district might be $85 per item, yet you could easily find a Chinese factory that will do it for $4.50. Volumes are higher, taxes and shipping becomes complicated and takes much longer, but for a long time it’s been too hard to resist those kinds of price variations. After all, it’s a lot easier to sell 300 $40. dresses than it is to sell 50 $900 dresses and we won’t even go into the wholesale and distribution margin problems. Fashion math is funny, but only if you’re not in the middle of it.

Now, some new developments are changing things again. Apparel it turns out isn’t really that lucrative, even at huge volumes, for Chinese factories. Other industries, like electronics, create a lot more profit thus labor and factories are losing interest in it. Fashion production on an industrial level it seems is kind of like an internship: you get experience and build out industrial capabilities, but you’re really just doing the foundation work for a mature industry that can start to demand regulation and things like fair treatment and even the possibility of a national minimum wage. Unsurprisingly the quality of manufacture and the prices of manufacture have gone up in China. It’s no longer the de facto lowest bidder and there’s already a big shift to places like south east asia and south america.

China is looking to develop luxury status, national brands and a better standard of living. In the meantime the majority of fashion producers jump to the next lowest cost producer, where ever that is. It’s no surprise that in more than 20 years of manufacturing being moved abroad the US manufacturing capabilities have been in rapid decline. As a small brand it’s frequently difficult to find facilities that can handle production beyond the most basic of items, such as T-Shirts. Several high level facilities produce beautiful things, only to be constantly on the verge of downsizing into being able to produce only one type of product or go out of business entirely. Some skills no longer exist in the US in a factory environment. Or they haven’t been learned or are not accessible in what looks like a comedy of errors. When people want to move production back to the US, it becomes a very interesting problem -even beyond the huge jump in cost.

It’s an interesting evolution, but as more designers and consumers want to make apparel domestically, there are enough problems that it’s helpful to remember what’s so great about it. It goes beyond current unemployment problems, but allows business to be more responsive, volumes and techniques to be better attuned to what consumers are really buying and more environmentally responsible. For anything so complex, it’s helpful to create basic guidelines that state a desire to “do good.” Some brands do this through blending domestic manufacture, organic or environmental certification in the materials used or choosing purchases based on fair trade principals. China is also beginning to participate more frequently in self regulation and it maybe that suppliers can choose factories in any location based on what certifications are important to consumers.

At that point we can imagine selecting manufacturing based on ethical, environmental and quality standards and challenge the idea of what the cost of something should be.  But no matter what – it looks like the bad old days of cheap ‘made in China’ fast fashion is coming to a close. We have such an amazing opportunity as an industry and as people to choose what fashion is going to be like in the coming decades. Will it be a positive force for good with a emphasis on environmentally responsible materials and good jobs? I hope so.

source: http://www.innovationintextiles.com/fibres-yarns-fabrics/digital-inkjet-printing-holds-future-potential/
Yep, it’s just a GIANT ink jet printer. But what it can do is pretty extraordinary.

It’s not just prettier, more delicate printing than traditional screen printing. It’s also industrial volume. Oh, and wicked crazy things like adding technical finish to fabrics. (You want that in covered in flowers and waterproof? No problem.) This is kinda amazing because most technical fabric happen only when the yarns that eventually create the fabrics are developed in a laboratory with a huge industrial process behind it. I like to imagine that I’d be able to run beautiful eco-friendly fabrics through such a printer and selectively add short run finishes (waterproofing, abrasion and flame resistance) making smaller batches far more efficient. Though having access to equipment this intense is clearly big-league stuff, it’s very possible that like the original ink-jet printers we’d be able to go down to the local Kinko’s and print out some pretty spring fabric in that gorgeous print you saw on COLOURlovers and make it waterproof, before having it custom stitched for you.

Ok, we’re not there quite yet. But it’s pretty close. I mean people just found a way to make ink-jet printers awesome again by making them enormous.

I love the future.