Features

Vietnamese manufacturer Fashion Enterprise could do well during the COVID-19 pandemic—its main buyer Cue not only did not cancel orders, but even paid deposits in advance. Chief Executive Officer Rodney Thanh tells the story of a company where 98% of the workers returned after lockdown.

I have been working from home for six years now. I had done this WFH (work from home) routine earlier too, but for one reason or the other it was always the situation that would be in control of me. I have now turned the situation on its head—by streamlining things and being fair to myself. Attitude-related Professionalism: The bottomlines are two: deadlines and deliverables. You should be able to do your job, and that too in time. Working from home is a privilege—a luxury that most don’t have...

For a long time, with the end of the quota regime in January 2005, the global fashion industry seemed to follow a singular model of sourcing. Broadly speaking, of course. At some point, the cost factor started giving way to the speed element. The jobs lost to the offshoring strategy of fashion companies were sought to be bought back home (i.e the West) through a reshoring drive. Even as things were beginning to coalesce and new realignments in the sourcing world were taking form, the discourse...

On October 21, 2015, when the European Clothing Action Plan (ECAP) was launched, it seemed to be quite an ambitious project. The €3.6 million pilot project funded by EU LIFE was meant to increase environmental and economic benefits by reducing the carbon, water and waste footprints of clothing in the EU. On December 31, 2019, the project drew to a close, and is likely to serve as a benchmark in the next few years, at least. The project involved UK charity WRAP, working in partnership with MADE...

The volume of world trade has not seen a healthy outlook for a few years now, and the dynamics are being dictated by trade wars more than ever. All this would mean that a small country like Bangladesh should stand extremely worried. Yet, it is not. Bangladesh is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018 fiscal year expanded by 7.9 per cent over the previous year. Industry grew by 12 per cent (10.2 per cent in 2017) and manufacturing 13.4 per cent...

There is such a term called a “creeping normality”. The expression was coined by American scientist Jared Diamond in his 2005 bestseller, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He had touched upon the subject earlier too “while attempting to explain why, in the course of long-term environmental degradation, Easter Island natives would, seemingly irrationally, chop down the last tree.” The concept is put succinctly in the Wikipedia entry on the subject: Creeping normality (also called...

Business processes in every industry sector are unique. Technology is changing the way these business processes crystallise, mutate and are reborn again to keep pace with everything else in that industry sector. But each industry has its own singularities and needs. This demonstrably poses challenges to tackle which the textiles-apparel-fashion industry needs to look outwards. Challenges Galore The biggest challenge, according to Kate Munro, vice-president for marketing at Bamboo Rose, is the...

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them. — Horace The earliest known shoes are said to be a pair of sagebrush bark sandals that date from 8000 BC—found in a cave in the US state of Oregon in 1938. The world's oldest leather shoe, on the other hand, that was possibly handcrafted from a single piece of cowhide laced with a leather cord along seams at the front and back, was unearthed from another cave...

To look at South India from the standpoint of the textiles and apparel industry would be a fallacy—for one might invariably start with the idle assumption that it is a composite ecosystem on its own. But then, it is anything but that. The five states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana differ from one another in innumerable ways—right from having their own respective textiles policies to the multifarious sectors of the industry that contribute to the overall Indian...

There are some ideas that never click with the public at first. An American machine salesman and engineer by the name if Whitcomb Judson learnt it the hard way in 1893. He worked on—what was described as—a “clasp locker” and launched the Universal Fastener Company to manufacture his new device. The clasp locker made its debut at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, but saw little success. Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American electrical engineer, was hired to work for the Universal Fastener Company in...