How does a shirt manufacturer move up the value chain without adding cost for fine shirting fabrics or using high-end pressing and finishing machines for making dress shirts? How does a bottom manufacturer move up the value chain without investing in washing equipments? The answer to both these questions is ‘workwear clothing’. While a shirt manufacturer can make shirts that are part of a complete uniform worn by a waiter, pilot, security guard or an engineer, a bottom manufacturer can make dungarees, bottoms and shorts with special pockets for holding tools and by just moving into the category a certain hike in the FOB is assured. The reason being, the manufacturing and testing parameters are a notch higher than that of regular apparels because workwear clothing has to withstand 8 to 9 hours of rigorous usage for at least 5 days in a week. Majorly manufactured by China and India, workwear clothing has also started gaining popularity in Bangladesh due to the rising wages in both the countries. To understand the product, market and business of workwear clothing, Apparel Online spoke to one of the biggest manufacturers of workwear in Bangladesh, Basic Apparels, and also to the biggest workwear sourcing company in Bangladesh, Dimensions, along with some inputs from other smaller players.
When working in dangerous environments, where the possibility of injury from mechanical shock, heat, flames, chemicals and electrical arcs is a daily reality, safety workwear made with special fabric is the best defence. Workwear clothing can be broadly divided into three categories – uniforms, industrial clothing and protective clothing.
Being the biggest category, the segment of uniforms includes outfits for hotels, airlines, police, security personnel, hospitals and pharmaceutical industries. The category of industrial clothing includes engineered shirts, dungarees and cargo pants, required for doing tasks such as welding, carpentry, etc. The third and the most niche category of workwear clothing includes protective clothing such as boiler suits and apparels for fire fighters, which are made with flame-retardant fabrics. Mostly, all the garments have anti-bacterial and other similar finishes, while surface embellishments such as embroidery and printing are only required for making logos.
Claiming to source every product mentioned above but specializing in uniforms, Dimensions is a UK-based sourcing company which exclusively specializes in workwear clothing. Established in 1948, Dimensions set up its office in Dhaka in 2010 and is currently sourcing products worth US $ 45 million, which is 45% of the company’s global sourcing. “Knit products is the largest category sourced from the country in terms of volumes as we have majorly shifted sourcing of T-shirts and polo shirts from China to Bangladesh. We are in the process of upgrading an existing vendor to produce seam sealed outerwear jackets with reflective tapes, which we are currently sourcing from China and such apparels are not being done by many in the country and those who are doing it are very highly priced,” shares Padam Vaish, Country Manager, Dimensions Clothing Bangladesh.
Dimensions works on contractual-basis with companies in sectors such as hospitality, security, logistics, finance, retail, healthcare and utility services. Through these contracts, Dimensions takes note of the number of employees, future recruitment plans, sizing and how often an employee needs a uniform or workwear clothing, which helps the company in forecasting its product mix for manufacturing. As per the company’s website, it has shipped 17 million products in 2013 alone, including 5.8 million industrial workwear, 2.8 million shirts and blouses, and 2.5 million tailored clothing – the top three categories for the company. Dimensions claims to dress 4 million workers in UK alone, which is 13% of the UK’s total working population.
When talking of uniforms, it includes the complete getup of headgear, shoes, outerwear and main uniform, all of which is prepared as a package for every employee of the company including employees with physical disabilities. “Due to this bespoke nature of our business, the order quantities cannot be standardized and the size ratios vary drastically. Hence, skilled merchandisers are required to handle workwear and initially the manufacturers in the country were not interested in doing workwear due to the same reason. But in the last four years, my suppliers have asked me to give them more workwear orders as they don’t want to do the regular apparels anymore,” highlights Padam. Equally significant is the fitting of the garments, which is tightly controlled by the UK office of Dimensions to the extent of supplying the patterns to the manufacturers and QAs from the Dhaka office are literally stationed in the vendors’ factories throughout the year. Moreover, complete assistance is given by technicians from the company’s office in UK in terms of machinery, operator training, manufacturing systems and even assurance is given for sourcing a product from a vendor for a fixed period of time.
“Due to this bespoke nature of our business, the order quantities cannot be standardized and the size ratios vary drastically. Hence, skilled merchandisers are required to handle workwear.” – Padam Vaish, Country Manager, Dimensions Clothing Bangladesh
Dhaka-based Best Shirts is making most of the formal uniforms, and Chittagong-based companies Geebee Garments and Timex Garments are producing outerwear jackets for Dimensions. “An outerwear jacket manufacturer can do workwear jackets by adding the necessary equipments required for reflective tape attaching and seam sealing. Similarly, when making a dress shirt, formal jacket or a dress pant, any manufacturer making similar products for other retailers can do the same. But for making niche products such as flame resistant protectivewear and special reflective clothing, one definitely needs a specialized manufacturing setup,” adds Padam. Some other vendors of Dimensions are BHIS Apparels, Interlink Apparels, Anlima Group, Vertex Group and Shanin Corporation.
Another company with a similar niche is Rasa Fashion, a buying office with a small factory of 125 sewing and 11 knitting machines, producing knitted T-shirts as a part of workwear clothing. Established in 2008, Rasa has supplied T-shirts to companies such as Starbucks Coffee Company and is sourcing workwear shirts, sweaters and bottoms for companies such as Phoenix Uniforms from 4 other factories in Gazipur. “We are capable of sourcing any kind of workwear clothing for our buyers and a recent addition to our product portfolio has been caps as a part of workwear clothing. There are quite a lot of cap manufacturing factories in Gazipur and the raw materials required for cap manufacturing are present in Bangladesh. In one shipment we shipped out 120,000 caps and due to the size of that order, the FOB rate per cap was just 75 cents,” shares Sultan Ahmed, Managing Director, Rasa Fashion. With a turnover of US $ 4 million, the company is also supplying caps to the French Navy. “Presently, the flow of workwear orders has declined from Europe due to recession. We recently started working with two workwear buyers from Russia, a market for which we are working for the first time. Since the importers cannot open LC, they give 50% of the money upfront and 50% after the completion of the order,” adds Sultan. Due to the nature of uniform business, replenishment accounts for a majority of Rasa Fashion’s sourcing.
From the experiences of Dimensions and Rasa Fashion, it seems that manufacturing workwear requires a factory to have a flexible and mid-sized setup for handling the style changeovers and small quantities. But an exception to this model is Basic Apparels, a casual bottom manufacturer with 1,000 sewing machines, which has successfully converted its factory into a specialised workwear manufacturing unit. “We are manufacturing industrial workwear for heavy engineering and automobile industries, carpenters, boiler suits and other such areas of mechanical works. Such clothing has special safety pockets in ergonomic locations to keep work tools. In a workwear, garment safety is of the highest priority, if any component of the workwear comes off, tears or rips, while the person is working, then brands have to pay hefty claims for that,” points out Ajay Agal, CEO, Basic Apparels, a subsidiary of Merchantex Co. BD. Ltd., which is a 27-year-old buying & sourcing organization sourcing from Bangladesh and is owned by Stefan Pirker, Managing Director of the company.
Basic Apparels developed the factory for manufacturing workwear dungarees, trousers, shorts, boiler suits, refinery suits, chemical industry suits, etc. The reason behind Basic Apparel’s successful venture into workwear manufacturing was the ready workwear orders from its existing set of German buyers for whom the company was making regular bottoms, and these buyers were sourcing huge workwear clothing in good volumes from India, China, and Cambodia. “Germany has a good demand for workwear, followed by the USA because heavy machinery and automobile manufacturing is still booming in these countries. Moreover, since these countries are developed, no one works in the manufacturing sector without wearing workwear apparels. Our next target is the American market and even India is a big market for workwear due to the presence of various specialized manufacturing industries,” elaborates Ajay, an industry veteran with 25 years of experience of working in Bangladesh, Vietnam and India. Most of these products are retailed at stores and are also sold directly to industries. The FOB of industrial workwear being sourced from Bangladesh varies from US $ 10 to 25 based on fabrication, style and volume.
When asked why Basic Apparels chose to manufacture workwear clothing for moving up the chain, instead of going for high-fashion products with value addition in terms of printing, embroidery or washing, Ajay replied, “Although the consumption of workwear clothing is low compared to value-added apparels, the replenishment business is high in case of workwear because it is worn more often by people working in various industries and its purchase is not optional.” He goes on to add, “Presently in Bangladesh, the companies which are doing value-added items are incurring losses because of the lack of understanding of the process engineering required for doing the value addition. They end up sending the goods by air, thereby diminishing the already low margins.”
Further highlighting the advantages of workwear clothing, especially in context of fluctuating markets, Ajay states, “It is the normal practice of replenishment orders being put on hold due to some slowdown in the market. When the same happens in case of high-fashion garments, either the apparels are sold to other buyers or in other market at very low prices or the apparels are bought back by the buyers at lower FOB rates. Normally, this situation never happens in case of workwear because industries and technician do not stop buying workwear products during recession or a slow market.”
Workwear also presents advantages in terms of standardization in product styling and consistent volume-business around the year. These aspects help in building factory efficiencies and streamlining manufacturing systems because the manpower is attuned to work in a certain manner, minimizing the delays and quality issues due to less style-changeovers. “We have been able to set up sewing lines with on-line finishing and packing at the end of the sewing lines because there is no washing required in workwear clothing,” adds Ajay.
Critical to success…
Mechanical resistance, colour fastness to washing and sunlight and comfort are the most important elements of quality standards of a workwear product. But at times fabrics are required to have properties such as thermal insulation, thermal stability, resistance to chemicals and non-flammability, when used for making a specialized product. The quality of the workwear clothing starts from the fabric, which is majorly sourced from China and is most of the times a woven blend of polyester and cotton. “For industrial workwear, the fabric composition is mostly 65% cotton and 35% polyester heavy twills, which is heavier than the same used for regular clothing,” shares Ajay. Basic Apparels sources all the fabric from buyer-approved vendors in China and QAs have been stationed by the company in the units of fabric vendors. Dimensions has a much more diverse vendor-base for fabrics, sourcing fabrics from China, Malaysia, Thailand and even some premium fabrics from UK and Italy. The company does procure some fabrics like polyester-blended knits from Bangladesh. “Since we just cannot compromise on the fabric quality, we source all the fabrics and threads ourselves, and then supply it to all our manufacturers, because a vendor might go for a fabric that is 2 cent cheaper and compromise on the quality of the fabric. We also do rigorous testing of the fabrics,” adds Padam. True to the nature of the category, Dimensions claims to have sourced some unique fabrics and accessories for workwear clothing, such as glow in the dark fabric and an unbreakable sewing thread.
“Germany has a good demand for workwear, followed by the USA because heavy machinery and automobile manufacturing is still booming in these countries. Moreover, since these countries are developed, no one works in the manufacturing sector without wearing workwear apparels. Our next target is the American market.” – Ajay Agal, CEO, Basic Apparels
The end products have to withstand stringent laboratory tests to ensure the performance and endurance of the apparel when the wearer is working. For example, colour fastness of a normal apparel is tested for one wash, but in case of a workwear product the colour fastness would be tested for up to 10 washes. Usually, a pilling test is done at 8,000 revolutions, but in case of a workwear product it is done at 14,000 revolutions. “Till now we have not allowed any apparel manufacturer to do the testing of our products and we have tied up with Intertek for doing the same. Most important to the testing procedure is the wash durability test and for that testing norms are in place to make sure that the workwear apparel performs as per norms,” adds Padam. Similar standards have been defined for the consistency in quality, look and colours of the uniforms produced by a manufacturer. Due to the same reason, workwear buyers do not change their vendors often and even the fabric supplier needs to reserve the dyeing recipes to ensure the dyeing output remains consistent.
“Presently, the flow of workwear orders has declined from Europe due to recession. We recently started working with two workwear buyers from Russia, a market for which we are working for the first time. Since the importers cannot open LC, they give 50% of the money upfront and 50% after the completion of the order.” – Sultan Ahmed, Managing Director, Rasa Fashion
All the above criticalities are dealt at the sampling stage wherein not only the complete technical specifications of a garment are defined in terms of the location of bartacks, the higher SPI in specific areas and other critical to quality aspects along with wearer trails are conducted before developing the techpacks. Hence the manufacturers are given clear instructions to which they have to adhere. “Workwear apparels have higher seam margins because seams must be of greater strength, compared to regular apparels. Hence garments can be rejected on the basis of inadequate seam margins. These aspects need to be understood fully before manufacturing workwear because safety of the wearer is a top priority,” shares Ajay. One of the workwear bottoms manufactured by Basic Apparels had 52 bartacks for safety.
Being a veteran in the business of workwear, Dimensions defines the key to success in workwear category to the ability to cater to the needs of the customers within 48 hours and manufacture customized products for a user or as per a company’s needs. For making deliveries to customers in the UK within 48 hours, the company has set up a warehouse spread over 520,000 sq. feet in Derbyshire, England, which has a stock of 8 million pieces of garments, headgear and footwear at any given point of time. Talking about innovation, Padam recalls, “We made shirts for a cinema company as a part of the waiters’ uniforms that had collars made with fabric which glows in dark as they wanted the waiters to standout while they serve the people watching movies in a theatre.” Having grown beyond UK to Holland, Ireland and USA, Dimensions has increased its garment sourcing from Bangladesh by 140% in the last two years, from 2.5 million to 6 million garments.
BASIC APPARELS – Success story of workwear manufacturing
Although Ajay Agal was recruited as the CEO by Stefan Pirker, Managing Director of the company for the workwear project, Ajay shares the credit for its success with Aplos Global, a consultancy firm headed by Virender Goyal, Ex-MD and Country Manager of EPIC Group Bangladesh. “We started working with Aplos in August 2014, shortly before we started manufacturing workwear bottoms. Since then we have shipped more than 1 million pieces without any major safety issues,” shares Ajay, who has previously worked with EPIC Group as the COO for 8 years.
The biggest change done in the facility of Basic Apparels was doubling the size of the sewing lines from 35 sewing machines to 75 sewing machines. The increase in the number of machines was necessary because of the multiple operations and high SAM value of the industrial workwear apparels which starts from 35 minutes and can go up to 120 minutes in case of a boiler suit. Besides the SAM value, workwear clothing also presents challenges in terms of stitch length and sewing threads because the usual SPI is 11 stitches per inch, and threads with different thickness are used as the needle and bobbin threads, respectively, with the needle thread being thicker.
The 1,000 sewing machines in the factory of Basic Apparels has been divided into 12 sewing lines inclusive of part preparation and final assembly lines, along with finishing and final packing at the end of the line. “With the help of online packing, we do not get surprises at the time of shipment in terms of the quantity. There are no missing pieces and even the extra 1% fabric which is cut, is converted into garment and offered to the buyers, enabling us to have nearly 100% cut to ship ratio,” explains Ajay. Another intervention for certain efficiency improvement is the employment of zero helpers – replaced not only by using automated sewing machines but also by working on the principle of industrial engineering for methods improvement and using innovative work aids.
Basic Apparels has gone for suitable automation that reduces the cycle time of sewing operations while keeping the flexibility of the sewing operator intact. For double-needle sewing, a double-needle lockstitch machine with a split needle bar was used. Due to the specialized needle bar, the machine can also be used as a single-needle lockstitch machine, a feature which is useful in turning the garment at pocket corners and can even be used for single-needle operations. “The kind of workwear currently being produced by us has double-needle sewing almost everywhere and hence the utilization of the double-needle lockstitch machines is 110%. But it would not be the case after 6 months when buyers will place orders for industrial workwear with minimal double-needle work, as the demand keeps on shifting from single- to double-needle and double- to single-needle sewing every season,” highlights Ajay. Due to continuous high needle work, all the sewing machines are equipped with large capacity bobbins and automatic bobbin winders.
Some of the critical sewing operations have been deskilled drastically with the use of work aids and attachments developed by the company. One such intervention was done to optimize the operation in which a reflective tape was to be sewn in-between the side seam. Previously done in three steps, the operation can now be done in a single go wherein the panels with the tape inbetween are joined together through an overlock machine and the tape is fed through a simple attachment. “Due to such interventions, we have reduced the pool of sewing operations that require specialized training. Hence we multi-skill a set of operators in very specific operations, while the rest of the sewing operators require no formal training,” shares Ajay, who claims that due to such deskilling initiatives some helpers were successfully upgraded to sewing operators. The present operator-efficiency is between 65% and 70%. Once operators surpass the 70% efficiency mark, the company would plan to start giving incentives as it does not see value in giving the same before 70%.
There are 16 QCs in one line – from inline to packing because final packing is also a part of the sewing line. 7 QCs are placed within and at the end of the sewing line, 7 are placed within and at the end of the finishing line and the remaining two are the roaming QCs, who randomly check the output of sewing operators. The inline QCs are responsible for checking the sewing defects whereas the end-line QCs check the overall look and getup of the garment.
The most stringent aspect of the quality checking is sewing margins and there is no negative tolerance in this case. So after the sewing of every patch pocket, a QC is there to check the same as the whole garment can be rejected because of this, and Basic Apparels claims to have maintained a rejection rate of almost 0.5%.
As the goods are passed on to the end-line packing, an auditor picks up 100 pieces from the lot randomly and audits the same at 2.5 AQL. If the 1st lot is rejected in the AQL inspection, the auditor will speak to the QC of the line. If the lot fails for the 2nd time, the auditor will speak to the Quality Manager and in case of a third instance, the auditor will directly go to the CEO. The company has defined its KPI for DHU for every operation at 8%, which is updated on an hourly basis, to keep a check on the quality performance.
