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Made in New Bedford: a suit designer retools - Abboud
factory bucks US trend
By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff | January 7, 2007
NEW BEDFORD -- Last year the Joseph Abboud suit factory
did something not seen in at least a decade in this old
textile capital: It added jobs.
The men's suit designer expanded its workforce nearly 20
percent to 590 employees and is investing millions of
dollars in a sleek new production system at a time when
other apparel makers have shrunk or disappeared from the
struggling seaside city.
The strategy also bucks a nationwide trend of clothing
manufacturers moving operations abroad where labor is
cheaper, tax incentives abound, and US companies can
avoid the rising costs of healthcare and energy at home.
Over the past decade, jobs in apparel manufacturing have
dropped from 443,200 to 196,500 across the country,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Abboud
executives say they needed to go against the grain to
survive in a fashion industry that has come under
increasing pressure to get products more quickly to the
stores and to meet growing demand for custom-made
garments.
"When everyone else was pulling away from unions and
American production, we made a strategic decision to
embrace the factory," said Marty Staff, chief executive
of Joseph Abboud, the high-end menswear-maker carried in
select retailers including Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom.
"We couldn't find a place outside our factory where we
could get the quality and flexibility to satisfy our
needs."
In 2004, Abboud executives considered shifting its suit
manufacturing abroad -- where workers would earn $1 an
hour instead of $12 in New Bedford. But they decided
part of the company's appeal lay in its cachet as a
custom designer whose $700 to $1,000 suits are made in
America. They also realized that outsourcing production,
the favored strategy of many retailers, carried with it
hidden costs. Chief among them: the company would lose
control over the shipping time and probably be forced to
make more merchandise than needed because of production
minimums mandated at many overseas factories.
Committing to a future in New Bedford, however, has
required some big changes. Over the past year, Abboud
has begun implementing lean manufacturing, a concept
promoted by automaker Toyota, which aims to move
products more quickly through the factory. In 2004, it
took Abboud about five weeks to make suits. Now, it
takes about a week.
"What Joseph Abboud is doing is counter to the market,"
said Marshal Cohen , chief retail analyst at NPD Group
in Port Washington, N.Y. "It allows them to be more
nimble and separate themselves and be in control of what
they're doing. Their destiny is in their own hands. It's
better than relying on traditional forms of importing."
For New Bedford, the creation of jobs is much needed.
"It's a real confidence booster," said Mayor Scott W.
Lang . "It was an industry that looked like it was going
to be wiped out from New Bedford."
Large brick mill buildings surround Abboud's factory,
many vacant, others getting redeveloped. At the turn of
the 20th century, New Bedford had more than 50 textile
factories, including Wamsutta Mills, one of the world's
largest cotton weaving plants at the time. Many of these
factories shut down or left the city for cheaper regions
of the country, and increasingly, overseas.
More than 4,000 workers made men's apparel in New
Bedford less than 15 years ago, including a large plant
that supplied menswear for JC Penney stores until the
plant moved to Southeast Asia several years ago. Today
there are fewer than 600 men's apparel employees in New
Bedford -- all working for Abboud.
The company, founded by Boston native Joseph Abboud and
now headquartered in New York, has grown to $400 million
in annual sales over the past two decades. The hope is
that the eventual savings from adopting lean
manufacturing will justify keeping its only suit factory
in the world in a high cost region.
Lean manufacturing is an entire way of looking at
production to eliminate waste and increase efficiencies
throughout the system, from receiving orders to
shipping. For Abboud, it's required everything from
retraining workers to moving its distribution center to
New Bedford. (Relocating the facility from New Jersey
shaved nine days off shipping time to customers.)
The biggest change for Abboud came in realigning the
work flow, developing a collaborative process that
organizes workers into groups that assemble, for
example, one jacket at a time. A worker stitches a
single sleeve or pocket, and then passes the garment to
the next person in the group. This saves time compared
with the conventional system in which employees work
individually on batches of garments doing one single
task, such as sewing buttons on the jacket. Suits often
get backed up because workers are waiting for fellow
employees to finish their batch of 20. For the lean
process, however, workers are trained for more than one
skill, so they can jump in and help prevent a backup if
other stations get behind.
Under the new system, Abboud can better manage its
inventory so that it makes suits customers are buying,
rather than guessing six months ahead what they want.
This agility is important to meet growing pressures --
created, in part, by cheap chic merchants like H&M and
Zara to provide consumers new fashions every week.
Inside the brick Abboud factory in New Bedford,
fluorescent lights hang from the ceilings as the
employees -- the majority of Portuguese descent,
reflecting the large community here -- work at stations
on hardwood floors.
The company plans to have one-third of its production
using the new team system by the summer to help
accommodate the growing custom business, which took in
$1.3 million in 2006, the first full year it operated,
according to Anthony Sapienza, Abboud's chief operating
officer. That segment is expected to grow to $5 million
in the next two years.
Some employees used to working by themselves have been
resistant to the new format, where incentives are based
on group performance. For now, employees have
volunteered to test the new system, and only one has
asked to be transferred back to the individual batch
process. The company plans to switch entirely to lean
manufacturing over the next several years, Sapienza
said.
"It's a big difference, work goes much faster. We help
each other," said Odette Almeida , 35, of New Bedford.
Almeida works at the end of an eight-person team sewing
and reinforcing buttons on jacket sleeves. There's a
sign above her setting the goal at 380 sleeves a day for
the team.
The group meets that goal about 90 percent of the time,
better than other teams working on different parts of
the suit. The transition to lean manufacturing hasn't
paid off yet, and it isn't expected to for another few
years, Sapienza said. But executives are confident that
the decision to stay in New Bedford is the right one.
"We want to keep these jobs in America," Sapienza said.
"But you have to be creative, you have to be unique."
Jenn Abelson can be reached at
abelson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company. |
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