Textile Factories Swift to Supply Demand
The world may have changed since Sept. 11, but inside Victor Tankazyan’s garment contracting shop it feels like old times.
Sewing machines are humming again at the North Hollywood factory, where 90 workers are busy churning out American flags--5,000 a day. Tankazyan also has landed unexpected apparel orders from U.S. clothing companies suddenly nervous about reliance on foreign suppliers. The plant, a virtual ghost town in early September, is now running overtime to keep up with demand.
“It’s sweet hearing the sound of those machines again,” said Tankazyan, vice president of Arthur’s Sewing Inc. “But it’s sad it takes a tragedy to open everyone’s eyes to the importance of manufacturing here.”
Some of Southern California’s embattled sewing contractors and textile makers are seeing an uptick in business after last month’s terrorist attacks. With tight borders slowing the flow of goods from Mexico and travel bottlenecks crimping the supply chain worldwide, U.S. clothing companies increasingly are turning to local producers to ensure a reliable supply.
Accustomed to manufacturing short runs of goods at lightning speed, Southern California shops such as Tankazyan’s are getting tapped to produce flags, red-white-and-blue T-shirts and other Americana that hit the shelves within days of the tragedy. Likewise, local sewers and knitters say they’re scoring more orders for traditional apparel that usually goes to cheaper foreign producers.
Garment contractors such as Gary Dunbar say the slowing economy has retailers carrying smaller inventories and demanding shorter lead times, forcing clothing companies to reexamine their far-flung supplier bases. He says his firm has garnered enough new orders in the last few weeks that his Montebello factory will soon be running at 80% capacity, up from 30% currently.
“The don’t want their goods tied up at the border,” said Dunbar, co-owner of G.S. Dunbar. “So they’re coming back to us.”
The windfall has been a boon to apparel workers such as Berta Centeno, who has gone from working part-time to putting in full weeks and 10-hour shifts to earn precious overtime.
“God willing, it will stay this way,” said Centeno, an eight-year veteran at Arthur’s Sewing and a mother of three. “I’ve got to pay for my kids’ schooling.”
But most are skeptical that their newfound popularity will last, despite polls showing consumers are now looking to buy more American-made goods.
“I’m cynical enough to say that it’s probably just a temporary phenomenon,” said Joe Rodriguez, executive director of the Garment Contractors Assn. of Southern Calif. “These [clothing companies] are just hedging their bets. As soon as everything calms down, they’ll go right back to chasing cheap labor all over the planet.”
Apparel employment in Los Angeles County, the heart of the Southern California industry, has eroded from 112,000 in 1997 to 97,600 last month, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. Local industry watchers blame NAFTA and other foreign trade agreements that eased the way for clothing makers to move jobs to low-wage countries such as Mexico.
Although the North American Free Trade Agreement has created thousands of white-collar management and logistics jobs in Southern California, it hasn’t been enough to offset losses in production work. Industry veterans worry that if the Southland’s apparel-making base shrinks more, Los Angeles will lose its viability as a fashion center.
As it is, local contractors say they often play second fiddle to low-cost foreign factories, which get the lion’s share of a typical production run, leaving them to handle re-orders and other fill-in work.
Thus, the local industry has developed a niche cranking out small lots of high-fashion goods at breakneck speeds, completing in days what can take weeks or even months to plan, produce and ship from overseas.
The versatility of the region’s infrastructure was on display shortly after Sept. 11 when David Glasberg and Ariel Preminger, partners in Vernon-based U.F.N. Textile Group Inc., decided to launch into the American flag business.
They quickly secured fabric, found a textile printer to put the stars and stripes on the material, got a local plastics company to design a flag holder and lined up seven sewing contractors--including Tankazyan--to cut and stitch the fabric into porch flags and car flags. All told, they figure, they have created jobs for 500 people, most of them laid-off sewing operators called back to work.
“Starting from nothing, we shipped 200,000 flags within a week,” Glasberg said proudly. “Nowhere in the world but Los Angeles could you pull that off. That’s the kind of infrastructure and expertise we’ve got here.”
But Glasberg and others say fads like flags aren’t enough to sustain the local industry for the long haul. He wants U.S. retailers, clothing companies and consumers to recognize the value of a healthy domestic manufacturing base. He points sheepishly to the fabric procured by U.F.N Textiles for the flag project: The material came from Mexico because he said he couldn’t find a domestic brand.
“Not one yard available in the United States,” he said. “How sad is that?”
Industry veterans say globalization of the textile and apparel trade is unlikely to be reversed by the events of Sept. 11. Still, experts such as LAEDC Chief Economist Jack Kyser say local suppliers just got a lot more attractive to apparel companies looking to balance their sourcing in a new world of tight borders, restrictive air travel and social unrest abroad.
“A lot of people are going to be asking themselves whether it’s smart to source in Pakistan or Indonesia right now,” Kyser said. “Price is no longer the only consideration.”
Jerry Salem, co-founder of Summit Sportswear, a Fountain Valley maker of custom T-shirts and knit sportswear, said he already has noticed the difference. Before Sept.11, he got a small order to make 10,000 fashion T-shirts for a nationally known label “that acted like they were doing me a favor.” Since the attacks, the customer has placed three or four more quick orders for an additional 70,000 units.
“They didn’t even try to beat me down on the price,” Salem said. “That’s when you know something’s going on.”
Textile maker Dimas Rodriguez, president of Gemini Knitworks in Vernon, also has seen a spike in demand. He said he has gotten so many new orders since Sept. 11 that he has more than doubled his work force to 19 employees. A recent trip across the U.S. border to Tijuana convinced him why. A crossing that normally takes him 15 minutes took more than four hours. Others trying to get their trucks into the United States have reported back-ups as long as 15 hours.
“The borders are really getting scrutinized,” Rodriguez said. So customers relying on Mexican suppliers “are looking to make things locally. I think it’s going to get even better.”
Others aren’t so sure. Sewing contractor Bob Reed, owner of Commerce-based Stitches Inc., took an early order to make 60,000 silk-screened patriotic T-shirts for a major discount retailer. But he said he declined an offer to do more because the job paid so little.
The Garment Contractors Assn.’s Rodriguez said local contractors and knitters can’t survive long as manufacturers of last resort. “We can’t take it for granted that this industry is going be around forever,” he said.
