De- La Salle

College of Saint Benilde

APPAREL PRODUCTION

Luna, Maria Nicolle Alexandra Lee

AB-FDM
December 16 2013
Submitted to:
Mr. John Guarnes
 While searching for several factories here in NCR area, something I’ve noticed
is how lacking we are of garment factories. Most of the ones that I’ve researched for
are either out of business or subtracted their work excessively to wither, packaging or
merchandising. The company I searched about was Cavite Apparel Corporation.
Basically, the company focuses on manufacturing high-end menswear which composes
of suits and suit pants. Most of the garments made are for exporting abroad, mostly in
North America (US and Canada). It’s done on a consignment basis where basically the
company does the patterning, cutting/trimming, sewing and finishing but things like
packaging and merchandising/marketing are done by the company/brand that orders
the clothes. All the fabrics and accessories used are imported from different suppliers
abroad. According to them, depending on the fabric they usually import fabrics from
Europe, Korea, Taiwan, China, India, etc. For example, they import wool from Korea
because it’s cheaper there and the quality is nice and silk from India for the same
reasons. Most of the fabrics they import are wool, cotton, poly-cotton, silk, linen,
etc. and they also have different combinations of fabric like 80% cotton – 20%
polyester, etc.

Like I mentioned a while ago, their company is divided into different

departments: Pattern Development, Cutting Department, Sewing Department and
Finishing Department. So operations are done in a very organized manner where each
department does their own tasks before passing the work to the other departments
and so on and so forth. For technologies used, from what I heard they had things like
motorized cutters, different types of sewing machines imported from Japan and
Germany like, single needle sewing machines, etc. and jak press machine and other
machines for different purposes. Everything is one big production line except for the
sewing department where it is divided into the coat line and the pants line. For the
finishing, since they manufacture suits, it’s very important to press the suits in order
for it to come out very crisp and clean.

For their quality control, they have what they call the in-line checking where
they check the system every hour and they set-up a passing grade in order to control
the quality of garments going out of the different departments. According to them,
their passing grade is 2% meaning only 2% of defects is allowed. If it doesn’t pass the
 passing grade of 2%, then the
products have to be trashed and
the whole process is repeated
again. After going through all
the different operations, there
will be a final inspection of
garments. In the final
inspection, they look at things
like the over-all appearance of
the garment, and check every
other detail all over again like if
there are sewing defects, like a
seam is torn, etc. and also
check for thing like stains, rips
and various other things.

From what I’ve found out, it is really difficult to maintain production of

garment factories here in the Philippines for reason like the labor cost, the electricity
that’s why a lot of the fashion brands result to doing the manufacturing abroad and a
lot of the factories resorted to lessening their operations by doing either patterning,
cutting or sewing, etc.

Based on what I’ve seen and heard, the ideal situation would be to have a vast
land and create a place where all operations will be done from creating the textile, to
doing the patterning, cutting, sewing and finishing and lastly doing the packaging as
well. By having all these clothing companies will find it more ideal to hire the
garment factory because all work is done there. It will lessen other costs like
continuous shipping and importing of textiles and other accessories. I think that most
factories abroad do it this way, that’s why they get a lot more brands tying up with
them. Even more ideally, it would be better to have a design, merchandising and
marketing team. This way, they’ll be able to conquer all aspects of fashion. It also
opens their doors to creating their own brand and not just doing manufacturing for
other brands. But realistically speaking, it might not be possible to do it in the
Philippines because of the reasons I stated above awhile ago, the expensive labor
costs and electricity. Also by adding a lot more different sectors, the costs add up
more and it might not turn out profitable at all.

Besides that, the technologies used are still quite old school, with the constant
advancement of new products coming out, it’s difficult to keep up with it. Because
this is not like buying a new iphone, a factory will require
several hundreds of machines and keeping up with the
latest products will cost a lot and by not keeping up with
it, it only results to more manual work. The constant
maintenance of machines should be done so as not to
result to machines that are damaged beyond use. I’m not
sure how it goes with other factories but I like that the
process of which they do quality control. It’s about constantly checking and re-
checking as to lessen the damages. They also have a very high passing grade which
would lead to sustaining the quality level of all garments. Besides making sure that
the quality is sustained, I think that work should be fast and precise, in order to do
this, they should set goals of how many pieces to make per day and as much as
possible complete their goals. In order for the staff to have drive to accomplish their
work, there should be incentives given to those who can complete their goals. I think
that by doing this, it will be a win-win situation.

Although there is several room for improvement, I can really see the difficulty
of upholding a factory given the circumstances the Philippines has. We can make good
quality clothes but competing with other countries who make the same quality
clothes for a lesser price is bad business. I think that in order to really stand out and
stabilize, it’s best to cater to more specific sectors, for example doing garments with
the use of local Filipino materials or doing infant or maternity wear, that way there
will be less competition.

By visiting a garment factory, I’m able to see and be more aware of how mass
production of garments really work. Because at school, we mostly do designs and
sewing of one garment so we’re not really able to comprehend how it works when it’s
on a multiple garment basis. Although we’ve seen how some couture houses/brands
do their manufacturing process on videos, but it’s still incomparable to how a big
factory works. We’ve only seen patterning, cutting and sewing process done manually
or by one person, but it’s incredible how a machine can do several ones at the same
time. Everything is really done in an organized and orderly manner. I think besides
that besides the modernizing the technologies used, everything else is done very
skillfully. In order to maintain the business, I think it would rely on the economy and
not so much on how the factory works itself because it’s done pretty well.
 (from brochure)

SAMPLES OF THEIR PRODUCTS: