![]() Parkdale mills free#The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico. That’s when its clients started fleeing the United States. Business flourished, and Parkdale acquired competitors and soared until the 1990s. Seeing that other plants in the area were streamlining their businesses and ceasing to make their own yarn, Parkdale supplied yarn to nearby manufacturers like Hanesbrands. In the 1960s, when its current chairman, Duke Kimbrell, took over, it was a single plant with a couple of hundred workers. That machine has enough lights and outlets on it that it resembles a music studio soundboard.įor Parkdale, the new technology has been its salvation.įounded in 1916, Parkdale is the largest buyer of raw cotton in the United States. Along the ceiling, moving racks like those at a dry cleaner snake throughout the factory, carrying the finished yarn to a machine for packaging and shipping. The air-cleaning room, where air is washed 6.5 times an hour to get contaminants out, could be a modern-art installation, with liquid raining into pools of water. Indeed, the absence of high-paid American workers in the new factories has made the revival possible. That costs his company around $17 for a given sweatshirt overseas, he says, it would cost $5.50.īut truth be told, labor is not a big ingredient in the manufacturing uptick in the United States, textiles or otherwise. Winthrop relies on labor - the cutting and sewing of the sweatshirts, which he does in five factories in California and North Carolina - is where the costs jump up. And, he says, the cost is less than in India. Winthrop and his team visit Carolina Cotton Works and Parkdale whenever they want, check on quality and toss ideas around with the managers. Winthrop says those problems have disappeared. Now that production has shifted to the United States, Mr. “I’m a supporter of outsourcing when it makes sense,” he said. He also found that suppliers deferred to his wishes, rather than being frank about some of his choices, which weren’t, he conceded, always good ones. who conducted the survey.īeyond the cost and time benefits, companies often get a boost with consumers by promoting American-made products, according to a survey conducted in January by The New York Times. “This is a completely different manufacturing paradigm than what we saw 10 years ago,” said David Simchi-Levi, a professor at M.I.T. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. While the size of operations remain behind those of overseas powers like China, the fact that these industries are thriving again after almost being left for dead is indicative of a broader reassessment by American companies about manufacturing in the United States. In 2012, textile and apparel exports were $22.7 billion, up 37 percent from just three years earlier. That simple, if counterintuitive, example is changing both Gaffney and the American textile and apparel industries. Instead, he said, the road to Gaffney was all about protecting his bottom line. “When I framed the business, I wasn’t saying, ‘From the cotton in the ground to the finished product, this is going to be all American-made,’ ” he said. Winthrop did not run into such problems, monitoring worker safety in places like Bangladesh, where hundreds of textile workers have died in recent years in fires and other disasters, has become a huge challenge. Most striking, labor costs - the reason all these companies fled in the first place - aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.Īnd while Mr. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative. ![]()
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