With Bangladesh touted as the next hot spot for sweater manufacturing, many global sweater producing companies have converged in the country, bringing global experience and expertise to compliment the relatively skilled and cheap labour force of Bangladesh. One such company is Mauritius-based Floreal Knitwear, which has over four decades of experience in sweater manufacturing with facilities in Mauritius, Madagascar and now Bangladesh. With a comparatively small setup of 400 hand flat knitting machines and 24 automatic flat knitting machines from Shima Seiki, Floreal International, the Bangladeshi subsidiary with a turnover of US $ 25 million, has created a niche for itself in a market perceived as ‘basic and volumes’ by the international buyers, by manufacturing sweaters using noble yarns like merino, wool, cashmere, lamb’s wool, etc. To help the company retain its niche, the top management of Floreal brought in industry veteran, Bharat Bhushan, who has many years of experience at Epic Group as CEO of its Bangladesh operations.

Floreal Knitwear shares its niche in the premium segment with a select club of sweater producers like King Dear, South Ocean Knitters and Crystal Group. The depth of company’s technical know-how and product expertise can be gauged by the fact that they do machine washable sweaters which need not be dry-cleaned or hand washed as they can be washed in an ordinary washing machine. Floreal also gives a total easy care finish to sweaters which enable them to be dried in a tumble dryer, an advantage as sweaters can’t be line dried because they will lose their shape.

The US $ 100 million Floreal Knitwear is a part of the bigger and diversified Ciel Textiles with shirts, T-shirts and sweater manufacturing, along with retail operations. The group, company comprises of Aquarelle Group (woven) and Tropic Knits (fine knit), which contribute approximately US $ 150 million and US $ 100 million to the group turnover, respectively. “When Floreal started the business in 1972 in Mauritius and later Madagascar, both the countries had duty-free benefits from the USA due to AGOA. But when AGOA was scrapped five years ago, it meant no duty and quota free benefits to the US market, so buyers moved away from the region and subsequently manufacturing companies too moved away, and the logical choice was Bangladesh,” shares Bharat.

Floreal Knitwear still has sweater manufacturing facilities in Mauritius and Madagascar, along with yarn spinning operations. “Even after the recent wage hikes in Bangladesh, the monthly wage of a knitting operator in Bangladesh and Madagascar are still the same – US $ 110. But when it comes to sewing operators, Bangladesh would be less than US $ 100, whereas Madagascar would be US $ 130, mostly because of lack of sewing operators in the African nation.” Presently Floreal Madagascar does 7 million sweaters annually, which amounts to an annual turnover of US $ 70 million.

Floreal started operations in Bangladesh 5 years ago, sourcing from sweater factories, but soon realized that sourcing is not going to work, since the companies in Bangladesh were not ready to compromise on the volumes for value, hence Floreal bought over Ajax Sweaters in Savar and since then there has been no looking back. “We are putting up a new factory in Gazipur with 200 automatic flat knitting machines and looking at doubling our production to 4 million pieces by 2016. We will try and do all 4 million pieces in noble yarns,” shares Bharat, who believes that future growth relies on product upgradation and moving up the value chain, and not on ‘just being’ cost competitive. Retailers and brands such as M&S, Asus, Matalan, BHS and Joseph Bank majorly source noble yarn sweaters from Floreal International. While the FOBs for cotton sweaters is US $ 6-7, the same with better finishes and jacquard construction have an FOB of US $ 10 to 15, in Merino the range is around US $ 15, for lamb wool US $ 10 and in Cashmere it is about US $ 90 per sweater.

What keeps the company growing is its professional and systematized approach to the business, which has resulted in formation of strong hierarchies and in-depth job description and objectives from the CEO to a linking operator. While in most companies the owner drives the production manager, in Floreal, Bharat has 6 head of departments under him and under them is also a separate hierarchy. Each person working in the company has a detailed job description and objectives.

“I was given a 5-page job objective document and our Group CEO spent 5 hours explaining me the same. The same holds true for knitting operators and helpers, who are briefed by their immediate superiors,” explains Bharat.

Knitting & Linking

The first and arguably the biggest difference between a factory manufacturing sweaters with noble yarns and with non-noble yarns, is of thesystems that have to be put in place for quality assurance, production monitoring and washing precision. “The downside of using the noble yarns is that you cannot afford to go wrong at any stage of operations. To safeguard, we start with defining the parameters like the yarn tension and the yarn feeding system of Shima Seiki knitting machines, linking machines and also the parameters for washing. More attention is given to linking operations as it is the most labour intensive process compared to other processes. These parameters are then explained to the supervisors and operators before the production starts,” explains Bharat. There is a ‘quality mobile unit’ in every section, which stores the buyer approved piece for everyone to see and understand, along with the technical specifications and the quality remarks.

One of the key jobs of QC is checking weight of the knitted panels against the yarns given before passing to the linking department through specially designed chutes. The measurement of yarn package weight against that of the knitted panels also helps ensure that panels of the same size are segregated together to avoid size mix-n-match as the panels of a ‘XL’ size sweater would be heavier than that of an‘L’ size sweater. There are two more QCs on the knitting floor – one is a roaming quality checker who goes on every machine to check the output, and the second one is like a stationary end line inspector who reviews the panels before they are sent for linking.

A small mending section is also placed on the knitting floor for repairing sweaters as at times yarn breaks while knitting. Floreal has achieved a remarkable man-machine ratio of one operator handling 8 automatic knitting machines with a helper just for unloading the completed panels from the knitting machines. Each of the linking lines is given a QC after each critical operation and one for end line inspection. The thread and yarn trimming is done by the linking and sewing operators to reduce the number of helpers required. The sewing part is limited to button holing, button attachment, bartack and chainstitch operations. “Since sewing operations are cheaper in terms of the labour cost compared to the same for linking, we are looking at converting a few linking operations to sewing like that of V-neck closing and side seam joining through chainstitch for some styles,” adds Bharat. After linking and sewing processes are over, another inspection is carried out by mounting the sweaters on fluorescent lamps of two types, one for the body and the other for the sleeves, and the sweaters are inspected for holes, needle drops, stains, broken stitches and needle marks. Before being dispatched to the washing and finishing department, the sweaters are again inspected as per the buyer defined AQL levels.

Core Competence in Washing

Washing becomes of utmost importance because of the sensitivity of the noble yarns used by the company. Hence the key to make a perfect sweater lies in the washing as the chemicals used along with the temperature, time and number of cycles, vary from style to style, and a sweater made of Merino yarns can have a lot of technical issues while washing such as crinkling effect, which cannot be removed once the sweater has been washed. At Floreal, first the sweaters are washed, then extra water is drained through a hydro-extractor and then the sweaters are dried in a dryer. Before Floreal does bulk washing, a small percentage of the total order is washed and dried, and checked for variations in the dimensions of the sweaters, colour fastness, the look and feel of the garment, which are noted and rectified before going for bulk washing. Spotting and manual washing of sweaters is done on the washing floor only, to rectify any spots or stains that might have arisen during the process.

The company uses two types of dryers which run either on natural gas or electricity. The gas dryers, are relatively hot and make the sweaters very dry and harsh. In an electric dryer, the garment remains very soft and doesn’t lose its moisture. “We won’t dry Merino wool sweaters in a gas dryer but cotton sweaters would be dried in gas dryers as not only would it take longer to dry the sweaters but also the cotton yarns will retain the moisture and it will start smelling. But Merino should always have a certain degree of moisture content, which is usually defined by the buyers. If a Merino wool sweater loses its moisture than it will not feel like a merino sweater,” explains Bharat. The problem of moisture retention of sweaters is further complicated as the yarns themselves have the ability to gain and lose moisture very rapidly. Hence to keep a tight control on the same, Floreal follows the international standard of 5% moisture content in the yarns, which has been communicated to the yarn suppliers. This is also important because if the moisture levels are high, the actual amount of yarn in the yarn package shipped by the yarn supplier would be less.

The finishing department of the company is one of a kind with finishing lines, i.e. finishing operations of label attach, lamp check, pressing, visual check, measurement check and packaging sequentially aligned in a single line. Floreal has five such finishing lines. “The advantage of having lines is that we give inputs to each line on the basis of different colours or styles, which will be packed automatically in the same manner with no chance of mix-n-match in the packaging stages,” affirms Bharat. To ensure that the sweater’s shape is retained while ironing, metal wire frames and boards are inserted in the sweaters so that they are not stretched while pressing, as it can result in a permanent stretch.

Coming to the company’s core competence of manufacturing machine washable sweaters, processing can be done at two stages – the yarn can be treated as machine washable yarn; in this case one needs not to do much with the sweater because of the yarn’s properties. The other way of achieving this property is by using side paddle machines in the washing, when the sweater is made of formal yarn. Inside the machine, the sweater is washed and processed in a very free flow and at a very slow speed, along with some chemicals, which make the sweater machine washable. If the sweater is total machine washable, then it can be line dried; and if it is labelled total easy care, it can be tumble dried also.

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