The Competitive Benefits of Outsourcing Your Clothing Production in the Right Country
Finding The Right Apparel Factory For Your Business
As the apparel manufacturing industry has become more labor intensive and requires less capital investment, its concentration is shifting more towards the developing countries and even constituting large amount of their exports. This can be analyzed by the fact that the number of apparel factories in industrialized countries decreased between 1980 and 1996, where as the size of apparel industry in the developing countries increased during the same period.
Asia-Pacific region, including countries like China, Hong Kong and Thailand, constitutes the largest amount of apparel factory, production plants and trade in the textile industry worldwide. The competition from these labor-intensive countries will become more intense, including low cost with increased skill and quality levels. Apart from man-made apparel materials, the majority of fabric and other apparel accessories are produced from natural substance which can be found plentifully in these countries for example; cotton, flax and wool. Thus, production outsourcing to apparel factories in these competitive countries will enable brand owners to benefit from the lower cost of production as well as the greater variety of raw materials.
The New-and-Upcoming Clothing Production Base in Asia Pacific
Asia Pacific is currently the world’s number one destination for clothing manufacturer. In 2010, half of imports to the Western world came from the clothing factories in this area, according to sourcing consultancy. The majority of leading global clothing companies have such a large proportion of their goods sourced from Asian clothing factories that it is extremely difficult for significant shifts to be made overnight. To illustrate, Thailand is getting ready to establish itself as Southeast Asia’s clothing factory base, design, and export leader. As the Ministry of Commerce of Thailand is the driving force behind this initiative and constantly seeks out opportunities to offer fashion and leather manufacturers, importers and buyers, as well as fashionistas the chance to meet, mingle and expand the industry. The main annual platform for this is the Bangkok International Fashion Fair and Bangkok International Leather Fair 2012 (BIFF & BIL 2012), which brings together the very best in fashion clothing and leather goods from Thailand and ASEAN in a single event. Even the fact that garment worker wages soared in some Asia countries over the past 10 years did not result in the majority of clothing companies moving away from these countries as the opportunity to develop labor skill and the competitive potential of lower production cost are of great advantage.