Apparel manufacturing has consistently moved from cheap-labour country to cheap-labour country. The resulting impact is that it can be difficult to establish stability and transparency in the industry, with production moving when a country increases its costs. We have recently seen facilities moving from China to Ethiopia, for example, and it can therefore be difficult. But it is imperative for brands to keep on top of overseas facilities producing their garments.
This is particularly challenging when it comes to ensuring conformity to global and regional regulations and standards, and these environmental and ethical issues are increasingly putting brands in the spotlight. As a result, both big brands and retailers have also established their own protocols that manufacturers must adhere to, to be able to produce for the brand. UK retailer Marks & Spencer’s Environmental Chemical Policy for Textile Processing (including wet processing) is an example of this.
With the growing ‘buy local’ trend and manufacturing close to the consumer for the ‘on-demand’ society we now live in, business models are slowly changing. One company with a unique business model is Swedish company Elobina. Formed in 2015, Elobina is a print and sew operation that outsources its production around Europe, close to each of its consumer markets.
Vilma Gustafsson, chief operation officer and co-founder of Elobina, says that the company was established to make it possible to produce exactly what the individual consumer would like, close to where they are. “Mostly people, designers and consumers are mostly ordinary in that it’s pre-decided what they should buy from the shop,” from what is already available on the shelves.
“For example, if you are a start-up designer you need to order at least 100-200 metres if you want to test a design,” says Gustafsson. This can be both expensive and difficult to manage. However, with the Elobina concept, “you can be a designer and test just one metre of fabric or just one cushion and see if your customers like it, with no minimum orders. One metre of fabric or one product, is the minimum.”
Harnessing sewing skills
As well as making exactly what the customer would like, the Ebolina’s second motivation is to try and utilise skills of sewing professionals left in Europe. “There are a lot of sewing professionals around, but nobody is doing it, it’s a bit old fashioned,” says Gustafsson. “Everybody is in bigger factories abroad. We wanted to bring sewing back to the locals more or less.”
Production has largely moved from Sweden and other European countries that Elobina has production facilities in, such as the UK, however sewing skills are available as a direct result of immigration from countries such as India and Bangladesh. Those moving to Europe with these skills are able to use them with Ebolina’s business model, supporting industrial resurgence and filling the skills gap. From an ethical standpoint, this also enables immigrant workers to better integrate into communities.
Gustafsson says: “Everything that is digitally printed and collected from us is then sewn by locals in both the UK and in Sweden. The idea is that when we internationalise more and more, we are also going to internationalise the sewing because – the idea is not that we produce something here and send it, for example, to China, Japan etc. We can apply the idea of using the local workforce.”
Rather than chasing cheap labour and subsequently having to work around the bottleneck of shipping, increasing lead times and energy and logistics costs, Elobina is also working with a more sustainable agenda. “The idea that we have behind Elobina is to provide the tools for everyone to be their own designer,” says Gustafsson. “We collect fabric according to demand. We don’t stock anything; we collect.”
Production
Elobina doesn’t produce itself. It has five producers around Europe that manufacture its fabrics and products. “We are neither the production for the fabric or the sewing we just make it possible,” says Gustafsson. “Our big input is the actual engine on the IT. We collect all the orders according to the fabric that the customer has chosen. For example, if they have chosen cotton then we collect everything, and they go in 10-metre orders to the producers. They never get single orders, we get them and then we collect them and send them onwards.”
With its knowhow of the textile industry and its outsourcing business model, Gustafsson says the decision to have minimal overheads has allowed it to focus on other priorities: “Our big thing is our customer service,” she explains. “For a lot of our professional designers we can sit for hours on the phone, even though it’s an internet-based service, and discuss what they should choose, which kind of a fabric and what would be the best choice for them. We get the information from all our producers. The sewing is a bit different because we decide. The sewers don’t decide because we made ready-made products and ready-made guides for what they do. This is so they do just exactly that.” Through this, Elobina therefore ensures each product is consistent and of high quality.
The company’s printing factories are in Germany, the UK and France and Gustafsson adds that Elobina is only currently not printing in its home of Sweden because of the lack of digital textile printing facilities available. Using analogue printing techniques would be too time consuming and expensive for Elobina’s business model. “The whole idea of being able to do what we do is a lot of individual orders – collect a lot of individual orders, putting them into bigger lots,” says Gustafsson. “That wouldn’t be possible with screen printing. So now everything is digitally printed in Germany and the UK.” The company does its reactive printing in Germany and its pigment printing in the UK. And it uses disperse printing in both countries. She adds: “In France we do bigger amounts of specialised, ecological fabrics.”
The company’s sewing is done in a women’s corporation in Malmö, Sweden. “The organisation brings all the newly arrived people to Sweden, so they give them a working place. We have another sewing studio in Stockholm and then one in Lund just beside where we have our office,” says Gustafsson. The sewing facility in the UK is in Leeds. “It’s a local women’s co-operative in Leeds so it’s not a sewing factory, it is 20 independent sewers and they have one lady who takes the orders and gives them around. It helps newly arrived women to get work. It is more or less home-based sewers that make up a big sewing factory.” However, because the sewers are home-based, they cannot have big cutting machines and other machinery at home, so the fabric is sent out to the sewers once it is cut at a factory.
Demand for transparency and sustainability
The sewing market is growing in the UK and Sweden, brought on by the demand for locally produced products. “We are in the phase where we are able to buy into production on demand,” says Gustafsson. “Altogether textiles is a growing market in Sweden and the UK, but the sewing market is particularly good. In these countries there is a tendency for designers to have locally produced products.”
Moreover, Gustafsson thinks this growth is due to the disenchantment with mass production. She says: “I don’t know about the UK but in Sweden and in Finland (that’s where I’m originally from), there is a lot of talk about mass production, about how it works, the conditions in the bigger factories in Asia and other places and people not actually know where they are getting their fabric from. We even have a lot of people that would like to visit the sewer and check that there is nothing ‘interesting’ actually going on. They say, ‘I just want to see that it is real’. People really want to know the whole supply chain.”
Transparency in a supply chain is therefore becoming increasingly important and is something that Elobina can provide. “Normally, you never know exactly how something is created. But here you actually can go and see the lady who makes your cushion cover before it goes to print,” continues Gustafsson.
On-demand ethos
This business model is not much more expensive than the mass production model because, Gustafsson argues, ‘people tend to forget the costs of the transportation’. However, Elobina is not aiming to compete with mass production: “Our production could produce mass production amount, huge units for example, but we don’t see our market there.” The company’s market is in more personalised products, from individual one-off products to larger orders for business for example. “We have produced units of 500-1000, for example cushion covers for some companies, but we are not looking for bigger amounts than that because then it gets mass produced again,” says Gustafsson.
With the personalisation trend growing at an impressive rate, it is no surprise Elobina can easily afford to stay away from larger production. This growth, Gustafsson suggests, comes from the desire to be unique. “Being unique is an urge for people, but it’s not that much of an urge yet to be that green. We have those people that want to be green and want to be sustainable, but I don’t think that’s the biggest reason for personalisation.”
She continues: “The biggest reason is that consumers want something that is special and made for them.” And increasingly, people like to create something themselves, design it online through ecommerce, it then gets made and is delivered in a few days.
Ecommerce
The rise of customisation has been enabled by a preceding rise of ecommerce platforms. Elobina provides online tools through which visitors to elobina.co.uk are able to select the product, fabric and design they want. “Ecommerce is the idea of the whole production on-demand and making something personal,” says Gustafsson. “It is the only way to do it. We need to collect a lot of individual orders to be able to make only one metre or one product for each customer so without having the tools to be able to collect all the orders once and automatically we couldn’t do it. The orders go in to the system that makes a big file out of all the orders. Then we just manually look over them and see that they are viable before we send them to production.”
In the Nordics and in Germany and the UK, ecommerce has been more popular, and the company has seen a rise in orders from France, where small-scale designers are starting to produce.
Elobina decided on the UK as its second base, having opened a second office in Kent and its sewing operation in Leeds, because of its traditional textile industry and the country’s positive uptake of ecommerce technology. The UK is one of the biggest markets for textile ecommerce giant Spoonflower, for example. “It is easier to target a market where all the people know the model and where production and materials on-demand is already established,” says Gustafsson. “In other markets it is not that popular. The UK is not a major market in terms of size but a market that already knows what the business idea is.”
As the company is not actually producing itself, it believes its business model is highly competitive with the likes of Spoonflower, which is already well established. The Elobina model differs in that it provides the ready-made product, not just the fabric, according to Gustafsson, but because it doesn’t produce itself, costs are kept incredibly low and they are not tied down with prices and capabilities. “It is easier for us because we can always change our production to those that have the best machines. For example, if 3D printing gets bigger in the future, we can just start doing it – we are not bound to any machines or places,” says Gustafsson.
Running and maintenance costs are also low, if not inexistent. This means the company can afford to make a loss from time-to-time, if very small orders come through. Gustafsson says: “We do make a loss sometimes because we have 30 fabrics to choose from, so we can’t make a margin on everything we sell. Want to give people variety. Production-wise it gets very expensive for us to do that. It is our choice because we wanted customers to make whatever they like but if you are a production company then you usually won’t produce a lot of different fabrics [with small minimums]. You tend to try to get your customers to just chose one or two fabrics. So, we can offer them a bigger variety, so we don’t have anything that we need them to take. We do stock fabrics but not a lot.”
Organic textiles
Some of the fabric the Elobina does stock is organic cotton from Organic Textiles in Wales, UK. The company has seen a rise in request for organic textiles. Gustafsson comments: “In the beginning we had organic textiles and almost nobody ordered them but now it is really increasing. People are asking where and how their textiles are produced and also about the certifications etc. Our customers really want organic.” This fits in with the greater demand for transparency and sustainability in the supply chain. Gustafsson adds: “It’s more or less the most common question we get asked and then people always ask what the best choice is – whether it is best to take organic or recycled polyester.” Customers are therefore much quality and sustainability-conscience.
However, Gustafsson notes that digital printers don’t usually like to use organic textiles. “The reason is that the quality is not equal, so you get a lot of waste when you print on organic textiles because it could be that there is a knot or something like that in the yarn [that can destroy the print] so they don’t like to stock them.” And, organic textiles is an expensive type of textile to waste. However, as it is in high-demand and benefits cotton producers and the environment in developing countries by avoiding the potentially harmful effects of toxic pesticides, and the reduced cost of production improves social conditions, Elobina thinks it is important to stock it.
Most of the company’s other fabrics, for reactive printing fabrics come from Italy and Gustafsson says that Elobina is looking for more recycled polyester fabrics to add to its offering.
To add to its original business model, the company also has plans to develop it further, in terms of digitalisation, in the future, particularly when it comes to sewing. “We want the sewing pattern to be printed on the fabric already when it gets to the sewers,” says Gustafsson. “If they are placed on the fabric already, the risk of being wrong or understanding something differently is eliminated.”
Gustafsson also hopes to be able to use 3D body scanning and measurement apps to get the right size for its customers. She says: “In our business we can’t have 10 different sizes available on site but if they scan their own body then its ready for them and more accurate. That’s something that we have in the pipeline.”
