Garment exports giant Bangladesh faces $6 billion hit due to COVID-19

DHAKA -- Bangladesh, the second-largest apparel producer after China, is set to lose roughly $6 billion in export revenue this financial year amid cancellations from some of the world's largest brands and retailers, 2 major industry bodies said on Tuesday.

The two groups, which represent the vast majority of the readymade garment and knitwear manufacturers in the country, said cancellations were increasing daily amid coronavirus-driven lockdowns globally, and these risked jeopardizing millions of jobs in the poor South Asian nation.

Low wages have helped Bangladesh build its garment industry, with some 4,000 factories employing 4 million workers.

Garment exports accounted for $34.12 billion, or 84 percent of the country's overall exports of $40.53 billion, in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019.

"We've lost more than $3 billion due to the crisis. All our orders until July have been cancelled or suspended," Mohammad Hatem, vice president of Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA), said.

"Suspended orders will eventually get cancelled. All these orders were placed for summer and it takes three months to get these delivered. If they are not taking supplies now they will not take it when the summer is over," said Hatem, adding buyers had adopted a wait and watch policy, and are refraining from placing new orders.

"Many factories will be closed if this persists," he added.

One industry source, who asked not to be named as the order books are confidential, said Gap, Zara, and Primark were among the brands that had cancelled orders.

Gap and Zara did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Primark confirmed the step.

All Primark stores across the world are closed and the brand has been losing sales of $807.82 million a month, Primark said in a statement.

"We have large quantities of existing stock in our stores, our depots and in transit, that is paid for", the statement said. "If we had not taken this action, we would be taking delivery of stock that we simply could not sell".

Readymade garment makers face a similar hit, warned Rubana Huq, the president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA).

Huq said some 1,048 factories that were part of BGMEA had reported that orders for over 900 million garments worth $2.9 billion had already been cancelled or were being held up.

Huq said the order cancellations could affect some 2 million workers in the readymade garments segment.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recently unveiled a $588 million package for the country's crucial export sector, asking companies to put the money towards paying workers.

"This is not enough. The government should come up with more stimulus to save the country's biggest export sector," said Rezwan Selim, a director of BGMEA.

Siddiqur Rahman, a top exporter who supplies H&M, and Walmart among others, said the situation was dire.

"We're facing an unprecedented time," he said. "No one knows how long this is going to take. We're trying hard not to shut down our factories. But how long can we hold out?"

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Taytay taps local garment sector to make face masks

MANILA -- Taytay, known as the “garments capital of the Philippines” has taken an economic hit amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. 

Once crowded by local and tourist shoppers, the famous Taytay Tiangge, which spans for over 5,000 square meters, is a ghost town after it was shut down. 

“We closed the tiangge to implement the social distancing policy,” Mark Jay Valdez, Taytay municipal public information office chief, said. 

“Unang-una na naapektuhan ang mga dressmakers, manufacturers, and mananahi namin. Nawalan sila ng trabaho at puhunan,” he added. 

To help ease the financial blow on the town’s dressmakers, the local government asked them to produce washable face masks in lieu of the usual garments they manufacture. 

“The municipality reached out to them, para may kita sila kahit papano, during the community quarantine,” Valdez said.

According to Valdez, each face mask is sold for P8. 

On top of providing temporary jobs, according to Valdez, the initiative also mitigates the insatiable demand for face masks, which, like elsewhere in the country, is sold out in every pharmacy. 

“We gave our residents masks, along with other essentials. We have also started providing masks in other neighboring communities. We have also begun supplying washable masks in some Metro Manila hospitals,” he added. 

As of this writing, the LGU has distributed at least 52,000 masks. 

Dr. Edsel Salvana, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, however, warned that cloth masks do not offer the same protection as surgical masks as they lack the filters found in surgical masks. 

“Ang cloth mask hindi gumagana dahil walang filter. Akala niyo protektado kayo, hindi pala,” Salvana said in a press conference. 

Valdez, however, explained that the Taytay garment manufacturers insert sterile tissue papers as a “disposable lining in between the cloth to make it effective.” 

“Meron siyang sterile tissue or wet wipes na tuyo. Napapalitan 'yung sterile tissue, and nalalabhan 'yung mask mismo,” he added. 

In a Facebook post that went viral, Dr. Chen Xiaoting, a Taiwanese anesthesiologist, advocated the use of cloth masks (and making one), as long as they are used correctly and washed often. 

According to Xiaoting, cloth masks must be structured similarly to the the three-layer structure of surgical mask which consists of a waterproof non-woven layer, a microfiber non-woven fabric in the middle, and another layer of ordinary non-woven fabric at the back to be effective. 

The Taiwanese doctor used wet tissues that have been dried and inserted it into a specially-made slot in his cloth mask. He also noted that the wet tissues should always be new and should never be reused. 

Xiaoting stressed that this type of a mask is merely to “prevent someone else's saliva from touching your own.” 

Similarly, in Thailand, the shortage of surgical masks prompted health authorities to encouraged their citizens to use — and make their own cloth masks — in lieu of surgical masks and respirators. 

In a public health ministry video, Panpimon Wipulakorn, director-general for Thailand’s Department of Health, demonstrated how to make cloth masks at home, and encouraged citizens to follow as well. 

While masks may provide a sense of comfort, the World Health Organization (WHO), however, reminded citizens that frequent washing of hands with soap is a more effective way to avoid contracting the virus. 

"Just because you wear a mask, you should not neglect keeping your hands clean. Because if you touch the mask and you have droplets on the outer surface of the mask that somebody else cough on, you could still get infected,” WHO Philippines representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe said during a Senate hearing. 

WHO also reiterated the importance of keeping a distance of at least 1 meter (or 3 feet), especially from those exhibiting symptoms. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Fashion Nova’s secret: Underpaid workers in Los Angeles factories

LOS ANGELES — Fashion Nova has perfected fast fashion for the Instagram era.

The mostly online retailer leans on a vast network of celebrities, influencers and random selfie takers who post about the brand relentlessly on social media. It is built to satisfy a very online clientele, mass producing cheap clothes that look expensive.

“They need to buy a lot of different styles and probably only wear them a couple times so their Instagram feeds can stay fresh,” Richard Saghian, Fashion Nova’s founder, said in an interview last year.

To enable that habit, he gives them a constant stream of new options that are priced to sell.

The days of $200 jeans are over, if you ask Saghian. Fashion Nova’s skintight denim goes for $24.99. And, he said, the company can get its clothes made “in less than two weeks,” often by manufacturers in Los Angeles, a short drive from the company’s headquarters.

That model hints at an ugly secret behind the brand’s runaway success: The federal Labor Department has found that many Fashion Nova garments are stitched together by a workforce in the United States that is paid illegally low wages.

Los Angeles is filled with factories that pay workers off the books and as little as possible, battling overseas competitors that can pay even less. Many of the people behind the sewing machines are in the country illegally and unlikely to challenge their bosses.

“It has all the advantages of a sweatshop system,” said David Weil, who led the U.S. Labor Department’s wage and hour division from 2014 to 2017.

Every year, the department investigates allegations of wage violations at sewing contractors in Los Angeles, showing up unannounced to review payroll data, interview employees and question the owners.

In investigations conducted from 2016 through this year, the department discovered Fashion Nova clothing being made in dozens of factories that owed $3.8 million in back wages to hundreds of workers, according to internal federal documents that summarized the findings and were reviewed by The New York Times.

Those factories, which are hired by middlemen to produce garments for fashion brands, paid their sewers as little as $2.77 an hour, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Labor Department declined to comment on the details of the investigations. In a statement, a spokeswoman said the department “continues to ensure employers receive compliance assistance with the overtime and minimum wage requirements, and the Wage and Hour Division is committed to enforcing the law.”

After repeated violations were found at factories making Fashion Nova clothes, federal officials met with company representatives.

“We have already had a highly productive and positive meeting with the Department of Labor in which we discussed our ongoing commitment to ensuring that all workers involved with the Fashion Nova brand are appropriately compensated for the work they do,” Erica Meierhans, Fashion Nova’s general counsel, said in a statement to The Times. “Any suggestion that Fashion Nova is responsible for underpaying anyone working on our brand is categorically false.”

In 2018, Saghian said about 80% of the brand’s clothes were made in the United States. Fashion Nova’s supply chain has shifted since then, and now the brand says it makes less than half of its clothes in Los Angeles. It would not specify the overall percentage made in the U.S.

The company does not deal directly with factories. Instead, it places bulk orders with companies that design the clothes and then ship fabric to separately owned sewing contractors, where workers stitch the clothes together and stick Fashion Nova’s label on them.

The brand’s clingy dresses and animal print jumpsuits are often made by people like Mercedes Cortes, working in ramshackle buildings that smell like bathrooms.

Cortes, 56, sewed Fashion Nova clothes for several months at Coco Love, a dusty factory close to Fashion Nova’s offices in Vernon, California. “There were cockroaches. There were rats,” she said. “The conditions weren’t good.”

She worked every day of the week, but her pay varied depending on how quickly her fingers could move. Cortes was paid for each piece of a shirt she sewed together — about 4 cents to sew on each sleeve, 5 cents for each of the side seams, 8 cents for the seam on the neckline. On average, she earned $270 in a week, the equivalent of $4.66 an hour, she said.

In 2016, Cortes left Coco Love and later reached a settlement with the company for $5,000 in back wages. She continued to work in factories sewing Fashion Nova clothes, noticing the $12 price tags on the tops she had stitched together for cents.

“The clothes are very expensive for what they pay us,” Cortes said.

“Consumers can say, ‘Well, of course that’s what it’s like in Bangladesh or Vietnam, but they are developing countries,’” Weil said. “People just don’t want to believe it’s true in their own backyard.”

For all their seediness, these factories are still producing clothes for major American retailers. Under federal law, brands cannot be penalized for wage theft in factories if they can credibly claim that they did not know their clothes were made by workers paid illegally low wages. The Labor Department has collected millions in back wages and penalties from Los Angeles garment businesses in recent years, but has not fined a retailer.

This year, Fashion Nova’s labels were the ones found the most frequently by federal investigators looking into garment factories that pay egregiously low wages, according to a person familiar with the investigations.

In September, three officials from the department met with Fashion Nova’s lawyers to tell them that, over four years, the brand’s clothes had been found in 50 investigations of factories paying less than the federal minimum wage or failing to pay overtime.

The company’s lawyers told the officials that they had taken immediate action and had already updated the brand’s agreement with vendors. Now, if Fashion Nova learns that a factory has been charged with violating laws “governing the wages and hours of its employees, child labor, forced labor or unsafe working conditions,” the brand will put the middleman who hired that factory on a six-month “probation,” it said in a statement.

The working relationship would continue, unless workers file another complaint against the same factory or another one that the contractor hired during those six months. At that point, the brand will suspend the contractor until it passes a third-party audit.

While Fashion Nova has taken steps to address the Labor Department’s findings, Meierhans, the brand’s general counsel, noted that it works with hundreds of manufacturers and “is not responsible for how these vendors handle their payrolls.”

‘Everyone Wants to Have More Followers’

Saghian opened the first Fashion Nova store in 2006, in a Los Angeles mall. Seven years and four storefronts later, he realized that he was losing customers to online outlets selling the same clothes.

A web developer talked him out of starting a website; it would get no traffic, because no one knew what Fashion Nova was. Saghian had a better shot on Instagram, where “there were some really basic boutiques that had 300,000 followers,” he said in the interview.

In 2013, Saghian opened an Instagram account and began posting photos of his clothing on mannequins and customers. He noticed that some of his stores’ regular visitors were influencers he had seen on Instagram, where they had hundreds of thousands of followers.

“I had rappers’ girlfriends, female rappers, models,” he said.

Saghian started giving them free clothing and they posted photos of themselves draped in Fashion Nova garb. In turn, he reposted their photos and tagged their handles.

“Everyone wants to be famous. Everyone wants to have more followers,” Saghian said. “By tagging them, the influencer would grow their following.”

Gradually, the strategy brought Fashion Nova from the outskirts of the internet into the mainstream. The brand earned mentions on hip-hop tracks. In 2017, its sales grew by about 600%.

Cardi B, the Grammy-winning rap star, unveiled her first collection with the brand in an Instagram video in November last year.

“I wanted to do something that is like, ‘Wow, what is that? Is that Chanel? Is that YSL? Is that Gucci?’ No,” she said, adding an expletive, “it’s Fashion Nova.”

All 82 styles in Cardi B’s collection sold out hours after they became available. She posted another video the same night, promising a full restock “in two or three weeks.” (Cardi B’s line is made in Los Angeles, but the government has not found any of the clothes in factories where workers have alleged they were paid less than the minimum, Fashion Nova said.)

There were more searches for Fashion Nova last year than for Versace or Gucci, according to Google’s year in search data. It has 17 million followers on Instagram, and at any given moment there are enough people browsing clothes on its website to fill a basketball arena, Saghian said.

To keep them interested, Fashion Nova produces more than a thousand new styles every week, thanks in part to an army of local suppliers that can respond instantly to the brand’s requests.

“If there was a design concept that came to mind Sunday night, on a Monday afternoon I would have a sample,” he said.

‘The Best Possible Price’

Many of the people vying for Saghian’s business occupy glass-walled storefronts jammed into the six frenetic blocks of the garment district in downtown Los Angeles.

These are the companies that design clothing samples and sell them in bulk to Fashion Nova and other retailers. Those businesses outsource the job of making clothes to nearby factories that work as subcontractors.

In November, The Times visited seven companies that got Fashion Nova clothes made in factories that underpaid workers, according to the Labor Department investigations. Some spoke freely about their work with the brand. Others refused to comment or talked on the condition of anonymity, fearing that they might lose the company as a client if they went on the record.

The five owners and employees who agreed to be interviewed said Fashion Nova would always push to pay the lowest price possible for each garment and would demand a quick turnaround.

“They give me the best possible price they can give it to me, for that will allow them to still break a profit,” Saghian said.

The companies can negotiate with Fashion Nova, but their power is limited. A dwindling number of retailers are still doing business in Los Angeles, and a couple of big orders from Fashion Nova can keep a small garment shop afloat for another year. So they look for subcontractors who can sew clothes as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Amante Clothing, which occupies a stuffy storefront filled with racks of colorful samples, regularly works with Fashion Nova. The brand paid Amante $7.15 per top for a bulk order last year, according to a Labor Department investigation conducted last December. Amante then went to a sewing contractor called Karis Apparel, which made the tops.

Amante paid Karis $2.20 to sew each garment, the Labor Department found. Fashion Nova sold the top for $17.99.

“We don’t own the sewing contractor, so whatever the sewing contractor does, that’s his problem,” said a designer at Amante, who declined to be named for fear of losing her job. “We don’t know what they do to give us the lowest price. We assume they’re paying their employees the minimum.”

Karis went out of business in April. Another manufacturer ensnared in the investigations moved production to Mexico this year.

But many more factories have evaded punishment.

Same Owners, Different Names

When Teresa Garcia started working at Sugar Sky, it was called Xela Fashion. It was 2014, and Xela Fashion, state records show, was owned by Demetria Sajche, a woman whom Garcia was told to call Angelina.

Several months later — Garcia does not remember how many — the name on her checks had changed, though she worked in the same grungy factory in the heart of downtown, a few blocks from a SoulCycle.

Now her employer was called Nena Fashion, a company that was founded by Leslie Sajche, a relative of Garcia’s boss, according to business records filed with California’s secretary of state. About a year after that, the name changed again, to GYA Fashion.

In 2017, the factory moved to an industrial stretch of Olympic Boulevard in East Los Angeles and began using a new new name: Sugar Sky. About a year later, Sajche stopped running the day-to-day operations and handed the job over to Eric Alfredo Ajitaz Puac, whom workers knew as her boyfriend.

Garcia said that she believed the point of all the name changes was to avoid being shut down by federal or state officials. Several workers, including Garcia, have filed claims against Xela, Nena, Gya and Sugar Sky for back wages with California’s labor commissioner, the state agency that handles such disputes.

In her claim, which is active, Garcia included checks showing she earned as little as $225 for 65 hours of work in a week, the equivalent of $3.46 an hour. She remembers the factory’s receiving orders from Fashion Nova for up to 5,000 pieces of clothing at a time.

“They needed it so fast, they couldn’t wait,” Garcia said of the brand. “We would need to turn it around within a week.”

Weeks of trying to reach Puac and Sajche were unsuccessful. A trip to Sugar Sky’s last known location just before Thanksgiving found a furniture store. Neighbors said the garment factory had packed up and moved out two months earlier.

Fernando Axjup, who was listed as an owner of one iteration of the factory, agreed to an interview. He was recently fired from the company and had filed his own claim for back wages.

“They keep changing their names so they don’t have to pay people,” Axjup said. “There was a lot of exploitation.” As a manager, he had access to payroll data and said Garcia rarely earned the minimum wage.

Axjup suggested that perhaps he had been fired for standing up for workers like Garcia. Garcia said she doubted that, given that Axjup was the one ordering her to hurry up.

He said he could never figure out why Fashion Nova did not visit the factory floor to check on how its clothes were being made for such low prices.

“Supposedly, the brand should supervise the people who give them work, to find out whether they are being paid well,” Axjup said. “But they never do. They never came to see.”

source: news.abs-cbn.com

US garments industry braces for trade war impact

MANILA -- The festering trade war between the US and China has created "some sort of panic" in the garments sector, though consumers are unmoved at the moment, a stakeholder said Monday.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Uniqlo to Chinese suppliers: Improve work conditions

TOKYO - Uniqlo-owner Fast Retailing Co Ltd has told two suppliers in China to improve factory working conditions after an inspection by the Japanese apparel retailer found problems, including long working hours.

The move comes after SACOM, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, issued a report saying employees at Dongguan Tomwell Garment Co Ltd and Pacific (Pan Yu) Textiles Ltd were working excessive hours in unsafe conditions, including high temperatures, poor ventilation and floors covered with sewage.

Factory safety at suppliers to global clothing brands has been under particular scrutiny since the 2013 collapse of a factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 workers.

In China, poor working conditions have been widely blamed for contributing to a number of suicides in recent years, such as at factories of Apple Inc supplier Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, also known as Foxconn.

"Respecting human rights and ensuring appropriate working conditions for the workers of our production partners are top priorities for Fast Retailing, and in this we are completely aligned with SACOM," Yukihiro Nitta, group executive responsible for corporate social responsibility, said on Thursday.

The company said it had told Dongguan Tomwell and Pacific (Pan Yu) to make various improvements at their factories and in regulating working hours. It also instructed Dongguan Tomwell to establish a workers' union, hold elections and organise its first assembly in March, it said.

However, its inspection found discrepancies with several points in SACOM's report regarding Pacific (Pan Yu), including that the cause of a worker's death was electrocution. It said it would continue its inspection and seek talks with SACOM.

Dongguan Tomwell makes clothes for Uniqlo and Pacific (Pan Yu) supplies garment factories, including Dongguan. Dongguan Tomwell's parent company, Luen Thai, said it took fair treatment of workers very seriously.

In response to the SACOM report, it said it was "committed to establishing strict measures to ensure that our operations are in accordance with UNIQLO's Code of Conduct for Product Partners" and that it would "make ongoing efforts to prevent excessive overtime. In addition, an independent system will be set up to review all aspects of this issue and to closely monitor the progress."

Pacific (Pan Yu) did not answer calls seeking comment.

Fast Retailing also said it would improve its monitoring system for manufacturing partners including beefing up measures to check overtime hours, tracking employee accidents and strikes, and introducing a system to monitor textile factories that supply garment plants.

Nitta said Fast Retailing would check progress within a month along with third parties including auditors.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Why cotton is no longer king of US apparel industry

NEW YORK - Cotton is no longer king of the U.S. apparel industry as lower prices fail to revive consumer demand and once-mocked man-made fibers take a permanent place in American wardrobes.

U.S. imports of synthetic clothing may overtake cotton garments for the first time in decades this year, while U.S. mills increasingly use artificial blends amid an unexpected revival of the threadbare domestic textile industry.

After a decades-long battle with its man-made foe, cotton will in the long term likely hold a smaller share of the growing clothing sector as lower-priced synthetics appeal to designers and consumers' love of natural fibers fades.

Market forces propelled the shift as cotton prices spiked to historic highs three years ago. Equally significant has been a change in technology, marketing, and consumer sentiment around synthetics. Gone is the shiny polyester leisure suit.

"Polyester yarn has evolved immensely. I believe fashion-savvy consumers in general are completely comfortable with it and wearing it," said designer Yoana Baraschi, whose clothes are sold at retailers including Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue.

The change in sentiment is reverberating along the supply chain.

Last October Georgia's governor announced that the No. 1 U.S. miller, Parkdale Inc, which alone accounts for more than half of U.S. cotton demand, would spend $85 million to convert a plant -- which for years made 100 percent cotton yarn for iconic Hanes Brand T-shirts -- to blend synthetic fiber.

When cotton prices shot to more than $2 per lb in 2011, their highest level since the U.S. Civil War, mills scrambled to find alternatives, hoping they could curb costs without alienating consumers. As it turned out, American and other buyers are no longer quite so fussy about their fibers.

"When cotton got to $2 a lb, we found there was a lot of clothing being made out of cotton where buyers didn't have a preference," Anderson Warlick, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Parkdale, told Reuters.

Parkdale, based in Gastonia, North Carolina, has seen a huge uptick in polyester demand across its product lines in recent years that is unlikely to be reversed, he said.

The switch to man-made fibers has accelerated in recent years as demand for cotton stagnates even though prices have fallen back to less than $1. The reason: synthetics in China, the world's top textile market, are still cheaper.

In China, polyester prices traded at about 68 cents a lb, less than half the price of cotton, during the week ending March 6, according to the National Cotton Council of America.

For the first time in 20 years, imports of clothing made chiefly of synthetic fibers, such as polyester and viscose, almost rivaled those of cotton clothing in 2013, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Administration.

U.S. buyers imported 12.29 billion square-meter equivalents worth of cotton apparel last year compared to 12.04 billion sme of apparel made of man-made fibers. The trend is clear: synthetic imports have risen by more than 20 percent over the past three years; cotton imports have fallen by 14 percent.

Designers like Baraschi, who has been working with more synthetic fabrics, say man-made fibers offer flexibility.

"Stretch is key, it has become a part of the way we dress as well as the way we move in clothes and of what we expect from what we wear in our daily existence. Man-made fabrics are now very breathable and pleasant to wear also," Baraschi said.

HUGE UPTICK

To be sure, cotton is still cherished for its premium quality. After years of shirking cotton in favor of high-performance synthetic materials, sports clothing company Under Armour Inc., for example, has developed a cotton line.

Cotton Inc.-- a marketing group launched to promote cotton over synthetic fibers -- has boosted its efforts to capture younger buyers' attention, enlisting actress and singer Hayden Panettiere in its most recent advertising campaign.

The now tiny U.S. textile industry is enjoying an unlikely revival thanks to lower-cost and reliable energy and shifting trade flows, with a wave of investment by foreign and domestic firms across the textile heartland from Virginia to Tennessee. Four foreign companies have announced plans to break ground in the last six months.

But some say the U.S. textile industry's renaissance does not necessarily bode well for cotton.

"Cotton's losing market share. Period," said John Bakane, chief executive officer of Frontier Spinning Mills.

The Sanford, North Carolina-based yarn producer, Parkdale's biggest domestic competitor, is boosting the amount of synthetic fibers in its yarns.

Cotton's supporters say a decline in the price of the natural fiber could boost its appeal. Rising U.S. output and an end to Beijing's strategic stockpiling program which has bolstered prices for the past three years, will likely increase global supplies and push down world prices.

Even so, that is unlikely to stem the tide.

U.K.-based textile consultancy and research firm PCI Fibres has forecast fiber mill cotton consumption in the United States and Canada to drop to 776,000 tonnes by 2020 from 802,000 tonnes in 2015 and above 2 million tonnes in 2000.

Synthetics have several advantages over their natural rival: without the threat of weather or disease, quality and supplies are more consistent, prices are more stable and technology has cut costs and increased efficiency.

"With polyester pricing where it is, there's no reason to go back. I don't see that switching," Parkdale's Warlick said.

CHANGING CONSUMER TASTE

Cotton's wild price fluctuations helped fuel the switch, but there has also been a big change in technology and consumer tastes.

High-end clothing brand Peter Millar launched its first clothing line of man-made fibers in its stores in upscale locations from the Hamptons to Palm Beach in 2012 in response to growing customer demand.

"What we noticed was that the technology of synthetics had really improved. There are benefits to performance fabrics," said Michael Bowers, vice president of design and merchandising for the North Carolina-based clothing maker.

Synthetic fibers fend off wrinkles and wick away moisture better than cotton, making them appealing to travelers and athletes, he said.

He declined to specify numbers but said the man-made fiber collection has grown "dramatically" since its launch, taking significant market share within the company's growing golfing apparel segment.

"There is room for both cotton and synthetic materials in a gentleman's wardrobe," Bowers said.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com