MSC maintains mission to create/retain jobs
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.
Carolina Textile District supporting resurgence of domestic industry
Posted August 9, 2016
By Devin Steele (DSteele@eTextileCommunications.com)
CONOVER, N.C. – Dan St. Louis, then-director of The Hosiery Center (now the Manufacturing Solutions Center), said he is glad Molly Hemstreet didn’t listen to him in 2008. Otherwise, the MSC may not be where it is today.
That year, as the U.S. textile and apparel industry was near rock bottom, she approached him with an idea to start up a community cut-and-sew operation.
“I told her, ‘you’re out of your mind,’ ” he recalled recently. “This is the worst time in the world to ever start a textile business.”
But Hemstreet would not give up her dream to return to her home county of Burke and play a small role in returning people to work in a region that was devastated by textile and furniture plant closures for years. So she opened Opportunity Threads, which is an employee-owned business. As employees stay at Opportunity Threads, they are given the opportunity to become an owner in the business. The company provides sampling, handwork, small-scale production (1,000-3,000 units) and mid-to-large-scale production (3,000-25,000 units).
As her business began to grow – she employs about 20 people now – she started to get more work than she could handle.
“Clients were finding us,” she said. “The fact that we worked with upcycled and recycled materials, and promoted environmental and socially responsible manufacturing attracted the younger entrepreneurs. The employee-owners were very committed so the company grew quickly. Because of our values and our business model we were being contacted by entrepreneurs from all over the country and we wanted to keep as much of that work here as we could.”
Hemstreet began sending some potential clients to the MSC, which had a supply chain network but not necessarily the time or staff to handle such inquiries, St. Louis said. Those calls, plus others the MSC was receiving from entrepreneurs seeking to open cut-and-sew operations, led the MSC, Opportunity Threads and Burke Development, Inc. to come together to create a network of textile-related manufacturers called The Carolina Textile District (CTD).
Formed in 2013, the public-private partnership was launched to 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. Today, more than 375 manufacturers and producers from more than 25 states are part of the network, and the CTD has helped more than 1,200 clients from more than 45 U.S. states and more than 10 countries.
“We had to build everything because an entrepreneur needs three things: prices, samples and a delivery date,” St. Louis said. “A mill is looking for an order, but that doesn’t often match up at all. But our supply chain is very complex and we can help.”
The CTD’s “value chain” – as they refer to it – includes designers, pattern makers, cut-and-sew companies, print shops, dye houses, fabric makers and numerous suppliers. To handle inquiries and connect clients to the manufacturers that can make their products, the MSC hired Tanya Wade as the Carolina Textile District project specialist.
“If you come in and you want to make, say, a shirt, great,” St. Louis said. “You first talk to Tanya and fill out a survey, and include if you have any money to get started, and we check you out. We then pull all those folks together necessary to make that product and ask them if they’re interested. Then we have a sample produced, show it to the companies and ask them what they’re costs are. We come back and tell the person how much it will cost and what it will take to make a move. At that point, if you have your money, we’ll go forward. If you don’t, we’ll help you go find it.”
The CTD today accounts for about 10 percent of the MSC’s workload, St. Louis said.
New ideas don’t always come from the industry, St. Louis has found. And the MSC is developing a program to help facilitate entrepreneurial endeavors, he said. On hosiery projects, for instance, the center has created legwork development classes that allow owners of would-be startups to take classes where they’re taught the basics of the trade and the manufacturing process. During that time, instructors also learn more about their project specifically and let them know what resources are available to help them get started.
St. Louis said an entrepreneurial spirit has been fostered due to a number of factors in recent years, including crowd-funding sites such as KickStarter that can help get startups off the ground.
“But what we’re also seeing is a lot of our entrepreneurs are under 40 and many are under 30, people who saw their parents lose jobs and may not want to find themselves in that situation,” he said. “And a lot of universities are teaching entrepreneurship, so you have a lot of folks wanting to launch stuff. Along with that, buying habits have changed. People want customized products. They’re willing to pay more, and they’re wanting what they want when they want it and in small quantities. And it’s been hard for a company geared toward large runs to change over to short runs.”
And thanks to entities such as the Carolina Textile District, entrepreneurs are being given advice, guidance and many tools to turn their dreams into reality.
“People often ask me what I think about their idea,” St. Louis said. “But it doesn’t matter because a lot of times I may think it’s stupid or I may think it will be successful, and it turns out differently.”
Just ask Molly Hemstreet.
“We’re trying to develop a training program that figures in the complexity of our industry because you can’t just have a general class on knitting, for instance,” he continued. “You have to understand the electronics and the mechanics and the pneumatics, where previously you just had to understand the mechanics. Given that, you have to train in small groups – one to four people – in order to provide them a thorough understanding of what you’re teaching.”
In bridging the skills gap, St. Louis said another unrequired role MSC is playing is enlightening students about manufacturing in hopes of attracting them into the sector some day. More than 6,000 eighth-graders have visited the new center as part of the Catawba Valley Community College STEM tours, he said.
“Every middle schooler in this area will come through this tour,” he said. “And we’re now getting top-of-the-class students to come in as interns. And they’re requesting to come in. And believe it or not, they want to come into textiles because it’s ‘cool’ again. And parents are reconsidering their thoughts about the industry, too. This type of student engagement is really important for us.”
The image of the industry was hurt during the last couple of decades, of course, when it went through a period of decline and decimation. But the public’s perception is slowly changing, St. Louis said.
“As a textile industry, we helped dig ourselves a hole by being quiet,” he said. “But we, as an industry, don’t really like to brag. We often think of what we do as ordinary, since we see it every day. But kids and school administrators are really impressed by what the industry does. They come in here and see our display of the (Unifi Inc.’s) REPREVE® product, and are blown away, for instance. They’re very excited that socks can be made out of plastic bottles. We have other displays of wearable technology, entrepreneur projects and incubator clients with fully fashioned knitwear.”
Services and solutions
The MSC provides a number of other services for manufacturers, including standardized testing and product development. The center has developed relationships with many resources, including universities and government agencies, to assist in these efforts, St. Louis said. The Textile Technology Center is one of its closest allies in that department, he added.
While the MSC handles mostly knitting and cut-and-sew projects, the TTC takes care of yarns, fiber and weaving, primarily – and both work closely together on various projects, sharing information and shipping samples and test goods back and forth as needed, he said.
The MSC conducts numerous tests (AATCC, ASTM, ISO, antimicrobial, etc.) on site, and has a number of knitting machines for sampling and testing purposes. It also provides fully fashioned flat-bed knitting, various sock knitting equipment, 3D printing and sublimation printing services, some for other manufacturing sectors.
Another critical service MSC offers is its “incubation” program, which allows companies to set up pilot manufacturing facilities in an area of the center. There, not only can they manufacture product but they also have access to the MSC’s equipment and services. Currently, four companies operate there, and another will be opening soon.
“It’s another way we help new businesses get started and create jobs,” St. Louis said. “We get so much traffic in here that business relationships are often formed when people come in and see these companies. We’ve even had some of the incubator clients working together to help each other on projects.”
New building, new image
The MSC sits in the heart of one of the hardest-hit regions in the nation, according to U.S. New and World Report’s list of “The 10 Worst Cities for Finding A Job” (Jan. 20, 2012). For its first 23 years, the center was located on the campus of Catawba Valley Community College, but its cramped environment was not efficient nor conducive to creating a positive image for manufacturing, said St. Louis, who was hired to run The Hosiery Center at its founding in 1990. With the re-shoring effort beginning to occur and the need for new, skilled employees, changing that image was an important next step, he said.
“We were out of space, but that’s not why we moved. We moved because we had to change our image. We were seeing all this stuff coming back, and we had to change the image of manufacturing, particularly textiles."
Dan St. Louis
Director, Manufacturing Solutions Center
MSC staff provided much of the input for the design of the $3.1 million project, which was completed at just $100 per square foot. It features large rooms (some air-locked) for testing, a classroom, the incubator area and a large, touchscreen wall designed by a Disney animator. “We show videos of high-tech textile plants on the touch wall, which is a highlight of the tour and surprises a lot of visitors,” said St. Louis.
“(Special Projects Director) Tony (Whitener) oversaw the construction to make sure it came in on time and on budget, an incredible feat for new construction,” St. Louis said.
St. Louis, in fact, gives Whitener a lot of credit for helping the MSC transform and grow.
“He is a critical part of MSC as he works in so many areas,” St. Louis said. “He makes things happen in a hurry and has a fantastic reputation in the industry. We would not be where we are without him. He also works with many of our clients on technical product development needs, many of which have never been tried before. He and Rodney Sigmon, our knitting product development specialist, have worked together to bring many new ideas and products to the marketplace for entrepreneurs and large multinational brands.”
The building is nice but St. Louis said the key is the 22-person staff that works at MSC. They all come from industry and know how to solve problems, he said. They are focused on results and getting the job done, he added “I am just lucky to be able to work with this group every day and learn from them,” St. Louis said.
With a new focus, new capabilities and a new building, the Manufacturing Solutions Center appears to be poised to deliver on its mission of creating and retaining jobs for many years to come.
“For years, parents, teachers and principals were telling kids, ‘you don’t want to be in that mill – it’s 110 degrees in there,’ ” he said. “Our problem was, we didn’t tell people that we automated years ago and our machines won’t work in those conditions. But we still hear people say, ‘we want to support advanced manufacturing – we don’t want textiles or furniture.’
“What they need to know is we ARE advanced manufacturing,” he added.
“We were out of space, but that’s not why we moved,” he said. “We moved because we had to change our image. We were seeing all this stuff coming back, and we had to change the image of manufacturing, particularly textiles. You figure in this four-county area, 50 percent of our people were working in manufacturing in 2000. And we lost 44,000 out of 188,000 jobs over that period of time. We went down to 27 percent, which is still three times the national average employed in manufacturing. So manufacturing is important to our region.”
The new building, which opened in 2012, highlights the new wave of manufacturing: high tech, expansive and clean, St. Louis said. The facility was created in an old-style brick construction to blend in with the historic section of Conover. And the building provided three times more space than the MSC previously had, offering an open environment with improved workflow. It was a huge effort and made possible by the forward thinking of the City of Conover, St. Louis said, adding that he is extremely grateful for their support.