A visit to Lab-Gear’s sewing shop on Friday yielded a very interesting conversation. We were asking about making some bags, courier style for the new line, as we knew that the shop had done a large variety of work in the past. On showing the sample we asked not only if they could do it but if they were interested. While the ability was there, the want to do it was not as more often it’s not worth the effort as people don’t want to pay what it costs citing ‘we can get it done off shore for a fraction of that’. When asked if they knew any places that could do work like that, the answer that came back was that they have all closed down over the past few years.

Why? The answer was solidly - ‘China’.

Our sewing shop is run by an older Italian chap, been in the game since he was 14 as an apprentice in Italy, so knows his stuff. Just before we started to work with him, he closed his factory of 30 people as the majority of his clients had started sourcing from China. While he spends a lot of time ‘fixing’ orders that come back from China, he made the decision to close the larger operation as it was no longer viable in the face of insanely cheap Chinese imports. We often spend a little time talking about this when we get together as we are all feeling the effects of this movement. Not only do ‘making shops’ close their doors but so do all the suppliers associated with them; finding certain supplies or services is getting quite difficult.

The conversation that went down on Friday was along these lines and stemmed from our inquiry about bags. He told us that he was asked to quote on a bag for supplying a local organisation and in the end sourced Chinese made units. Looking at the catalogue, he pointed out the bags he had ordered and we both agreed that locally, one could not buy the zips for the price of the WHOLE bag sourced from China. Now granted that these were not the ‘duck’s nuts’ of bags, they were of the cheap nylon, cheap fittings variety - the sort an organisation gives away or sells as a cheap promo item, but for many local makers, they were the bread and butter stuff. He also showed us a sports top and lined jacket that he was sourcing. Like the bags, we can not buy the fabric for the price of the finished items! One has to wonder just how little they must pay their workers and while we know certain things, these prices truly boggled even us. So the rationale from his perspective was to either loose the job altogether, or source cheap Chinese made stuff that fitted the bill and make his money on the markup, so that’s what he did…. he made more money from doing that than if he had made them locally himself.

Sad but true.

We then got to talking about a tactic some local companies are now increasingly using, something we have heard about before in other sectors but not in the ‘rag trade’. A local company will have a local supplier do all the grunt work, telling them that a big order is on the way if they’ll do the upfront work, which never really pays for itself unless the cost in amortised over the entire production run. After all the samples and patterns are done, they pack the lot up and send it off to China, leaving the local supplier high and dry. Sounds like a good tactic but the snap back is that local suppliers are increasingly unwilling to do any form of preliminary work, which if you have to R&D, is a disaster. So as suppliers become increasingly burnt by greedy local upstarts, they start to shut out other operations that have honest intentions. It’s an evil cycle. The example he cited was lying in a box on the shop floor. He stopped the job 1/5th of the way through as he found out they were intending on doing this to him. 14 designs that needed to be realised (they were nothing more than crude sketches), patterns made, samples and fabrics sourced and embroidery applied. From our experience about $10k’s worth of work through a sample house. They attempted to lure him with the promise of production but on the proviso that he’d do the work for $1200! It’s more common than you’d think.

So we spoke about ‘our’ bags and our market. For several years now we have an increasing market that does not want to buy made in China, on principle alone at times. Customers are prepared to pay that little more in a shop, or buy from a mark like Lab-Gear direct for Western made, sustainable products. The ironic part of this is that as this market grows, we are finding it harder to supply it with product we’d like to do. Sure, we can and will continue to do so, but we are finding the ability to undertake certain projects increasingly difficult as the supply for us is just not there. While we agreed to work together to try and realise some of these bag ideas we have, but where he pays his workers $25 an hour, we have to make sure that we can make these items work for him, us and our customers; time to put on the thinking caps. Ultimately, our supplier wants only to work with companies that understand the worth of producing locally and while the work is there, it’s not quite enough right now to spark the catalyst needed to turn things around for the whole.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Not only are the enlightened consumers starting to demand more sustainable, non Chinese made product but slowly many labels and brands are pulling out of China and coming back onshore. We consider China to be it’s own greatest enemy and time and time again are we told stories where China side sourced products arrive defective, wrong, poor quality and made from inferior, badly substituted components. Already several major fashion labels have moved production back locally as the faults and defects coming back were costing them more than the savings they were making. The catch is that to do this a foundation of skills and infrastructure that once existed has to be re-established, difficult, slow and expensive.

We don’t think ‘made in China’ will ever go away but given time, people will demand more from what they buy. It’s already starting to happen in Europe, with Italy introducing the ‘Made In Italy Certificate‘, to which local consumers are wholeheartedly supporting. What we do think needs to happen is for governments, like the Italian, to step up to the plate and support and promote locally made. Not in a token gesture like you find in Australia but really getting behind the effort to bring things back to local industry. While it will never apply to everything, there needs to be more balance, more choice and most of all, more information and incentive. As we’ve seen, waiting for corporates to do it is never going to happen, they have a thing called the bottom line, so it’s up to the consumer and for that to happen it’s up to the government to inform and promote.