Posted August 9, 2016

 

By Devin Steele (DSteele@eTextileCommunications.com)

 

CONOVER, N.C. – For 26 years, the ultimate mission of the Manufacturing Solutions Center (MSC) at Catawba Valley Community College – formerly The Hosiery Center – has remained the same, according to Dan St. Louis, its director.

 

“We’re all about creating and retaining jobs here in the U.S.,” he told eTC recently during a visit to the center’s three-and-a-half-year-old, state-of-the-art building beside the Conover railroad station.

 

To stay true to that simple mission, the MSC has expanded its focus, clientele and activities, particularly over the last six years as entrepreneurialism has expanded and U.S. manufacturing has gone through something of a metamorphosis, St. Louis said. And the center has changed by necessity, he added.

 

Though it had already changed its name to the Manufacturing Solutions Center in 2009 to better reflect its reach beyond hosiery/textiles, the center began to see a seismic shift that would soon lead it into uncharted territory, he said.

 

“In 2010, we started getting calls from entrepreneurs looking for made-in-the-USA products,” he said. “And it quickly hit a crescendo. We were getting slammed. It got to the point that we had three people tied up all day long handling these type of inquiries. We had to try to do something to fix that because we weren’t getting anything else done. But that was important, too, since our mission is jobs.”

 

That seemingly sudden surge of requests – mostly related to the textile cut-and-sew trade – convinced St. Louis, his staff and other partners that they needed to develop a plan a help facilitate entrepreneurs and existing companies looking to hop on the made-in-America wave. “We had to create a whole mechanism to handle this,” St. Louis said.

 

The CTD is born

 

Enter the Carolina Textile District (CTD). This strategic value chain network of textile-related manufacturers provides information, support and services to startups, existing and scaling businesses. The public/private partnership was formed in 2013 by leveraging existing relationships between Burke Development, Inc., custom cut-and-sew company Opportunity Threads and the MSC.

 

The three entities realized they could help meet entrepreneurial demand by utilizing the region’s existing assets, infrastructure and heritage of textile manufacturing to drive work into communities previously devastated by job losses and unemployment, St. Louis said.

 

The CTD started with two textile partners and has quickly grown to a network of more than 375 manufacturers and producers from more than 25 states that are collectively working to produce goods and facilitate the re-shoring of this industry.

 

In the last three years, the CTD has helped more than 1,200 clients from more than 45 U.S. states and more than 10 countries.

 

“These are all individual clients/companies,” St. Louis said. “We needed something beyond a scenario where someone calls me and I give them a phone number for a cut and sew company, spinner or knitter. We take them through the process to get them ready and figure out first if they even need to be in business and, if so, we help them create a one-stop shop of resources by coordinating the domestic textile supply chain.”

 

Today, the Carolina Textile District constitutes about 10 percent of the MSC’s workload, St. Louis said.

 

Tackling the skills gap

 

The MSC, which employs 22 people, also has its finger on the pulse of other huge industry challenges: the aging workforce and the skills gap, St. Louis said. Manufacturers – textile and apparel companies, in particular – have been sounding the alarm for years about this rapidly growing, critical issue, and the MSC is doing its best to help improve this situation, he added.

 

“We’re trying to pull out all stops wherever we can to solve this issue,” St. Louis said. “It’s not going to solve itself. We’re going at DEFCON 5 to try to fix that. We don’t have the answers for all of it, but we have to do our part. If we don’t figure that out, where will the industry be in 10 years? When people retire, we lose that technical advantage. We have to recruit and get people involved.

 

“And we have to do this in a hurry,” he continued. “It scares me. It’s not good when I go into meetings and I’m the youngest person there.”

 

St. Louis said he also is working with outside resources to develop solutions for this issue. Among them is Sam Buff, director of the Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center (TTC) in Belmont, N.C., which is also part of North Carolina’s community college system, he said. “Sam and I have been working on a lot of ideas and proposals and we’re trying to push those to try to get the resources to do those things.”

 

Part of the solution is in training – but training isn’t what it used to be, St. Louis added. With recent technological advances and limited resources, the MSC has had to set up training differently than how it did less than a decade ago, he said.

 

“Instead of just going out and teaching a class, we’re now teaching ‘train the trainer’ so they can teach the class themselves when new people are hired,” he said. “And we’re doing more in-plant training. We’ve been fortunate to have a technician (Rick Small) for many years who does this and works with people on the teaching part. We’re trying to see how we can use this model for a lot of things.”

 

Training has also changed from a technological standpoint, St. Louis said.

 

“It used to be that you just learned one particular machine,” he said. “You would learn how to fix whatever that machine was and learn about the yarns and the dyeing and finishing through practice and osmosis over a period of time. Now, in order to be successful, you better know what’s going on in the yarns and fibers and all the other things that you didn’t have to necessarily worry about before.