“I’ve never worked anywhere else,” he said in his introductory remarks. “I started helping out in the summers when I was 12, sweeping floors or running sewing machines – anything I needed to do. I’ve enjoyed this immensely.”
Wootten said he didn’t even have doubts about joining his family’s home textiles business even after speaking, in 2003, with his Harvard University economics professor, Martin Feldstein, who served as an economic adviser to President George W. Bush.
“I asked him his perspective on our industry and his response was, ‘I’d get the hell out as quick as I could if I were you,’ ” Wootten recalled. “Then he went into this diatribe about geo-global politics and how the (U.S. textile) industry would never have a chance again. But it did nothing but reaffirm my desire to come back in the business and see what we could do with it.”
He, of course, joined the company after college and HomTex survived the industry’s lean period and enjoyed growth in recent years. The company manufactures home textiles, apparel, upholstery, technical fabrics, terry fabrics and more.
But HomTex has changed its business model over the years to get to this point, Wootten said. His father founded the company as a contract garment cut-and-sew operation but that business would prove unsustainable after a few years, with NAFTA being signed and the end of the Multi-Fiber Agreement approaching, he said.
So Jerry Wootten began looking for alternatives and found the sheeting product category as a good option, his son said.
“My father is an innovative, creative person,” Jeremy Wootten said. “There aren’t many people who can come up with three patents on fitted sheets in about a decade, but he did. Today, he and I share about 15 patents and pending patents on bedding items.”
HomTex’s core business of home textiles started in the mid-’90s with the DreamFit brand and it has grown, he reported. But by late in that decade, the days of huge truckloads of shipments were dwindling, he added.
“He did have manual sewing and that was what he focused on, and he did that through innovation,” Wootten said. “One, by focusing on his patented fitted constructions. Two, by focusing on a niche market that no one else was really servicing. And, three, by focusing on basically one-off items.”
Posted August 24, 2016
By Devin Steele (DSteele@eTextileCommunications.com)
BELMONT, N.C. – In addition to Nester Hosiery President & CEO Kelly Nester’s presentation covered in Part 1 last week, the made-in-America mantra resonated from the walls and ceilings of Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center auditorium here this month during the Southern Textile Association’s (STA’s) 12th annual Summer Marketing Forum here.
Nearly 150 members and guests attended the 12th annual event on the college’s Kimbrell Campus. This week, a representative of an Alabama-based textiles producer is highlighted.
Proving naysayers wrong
Jeremy Wootten, president HomTex, Inc., Vinemont, Ala., gave an overview of the company his father Jerry Wootten founded in 1987 and presented a number of industry statistics related to the cut-and-sew sector in the U.S.
STA Chairman Todd Wemyss of Glen Raven Technical Fabrics, Norlina, N.C., introduces the program.
STA Summer Marketing Forum: Part 2
HomTex leader tells its made-in-USA story
That, he said, opened several niche businesses opportunities for home textiles: sheeting, pillows, duvet covers and mattress pads for mattress stores, boutique stores and e-commerce, which positioned the company for the turn of the century, he added.
“Today, we’ve taken that foundation of business and grown and expanded into multiple categories,” Wootten said.
The U.S. textile industry recession was good and bad for the company, he noted.
“It was bad for all the known reasons,” he said. “But it was good because people were scared of inventory. So our low case-pack minimums, our unique business model to niche markets really began to get attention. Plus, they needed our products to offset the downturn in their foot traffic. The other good thing is it allowed us to acquire assets at a little bit of a reduced price.”
In 2010, HomTex began looking for niche categories within and outside the home textiles category.
Today, HomTex has more than 750,000 square feet of production and distribution facilities in the U.S. located in Vinemont, Ala.; Sylva, N.C.; Oneonta, Ala.; Waynesboro, Tenn.; Leoma, Tenn.; and Belton, S.C. An additional 300,000-square-foot manufacturing facility is being brought on line in Cullman, Ala., this year. The company has offices in Hangzhou, China, and Mumbai, India, as well as full time personnel in Pakistan. Showrooms are in Las Vegas at the World Market Center and in New York.
Though the company’s products aren’t all made in the U.S. and it doesn’t use a 100 percent U.S. supply chain, it strives to do go local as much as possible, Wootten said.
“We’re trying to do more made-in-America stories,” he said. “For us, in the home textiles business, we just don’t have enough weaving for our home textiles market. On the home textiles side, it’s very difficult to do a complete made-in-the-USA story and do it at a price that makes sense. So for us, our business model since the ’90s has been mixed. We buy in the U.S. where we can, we dye and print in the U.S. where we can, but we’ve opened offices overseas to flow that model.
“So our secret sauce in what we’re doing today and why we’ve been able to survive is taking the right mix of made in the USA with the right mix of what we have to do overseas and blending them to offer a service and an innovative product to our customer base,” he added.
Read Part 1:
Music to forum attendees' ears: Made in America
The state of cut and sew
Wootten went on to show a number of industry statistics that tell part of the U.S. apparel supply chain story and how they have impacted the industry. One slide illustrated the number of U.S. apparel manufacturers by county (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010). Of note: only two areas (Los Angeles and New York) have 500 or more establishments. Also, In the Southeast, the concentration of apparel operations are in North Alabama, North Mississippi, North Georgia, Central and Eastern Tennessee, Southeast Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, Central and Western North Carolina and Upstate South Carolina.
Of sewing machine operators by state (BLS, 2014), California has 32,510 and the Southeastern U.S. total is 33,230, he pointed out.
Wootten also provided some interesting wage statistics that compared 1992 to the latest year available, 2012. He noted that even though the employment levels for sewing machine operators have dropped 80 percent during that timeframe, the wage has remained static related to other production jobs. However, competition from jobs in non-manufacturing sectors, such as the retail trade, is increasing because the compensation for non-manufacturing jobs has increased significantly over the past two decades, he added.
“Jobs in the sewing trade have to become more appealing to meet the growing demand while not allowing drastic wage increases,” Wootten said.
The average wage of the sewing machine operator in California is lower than the average wage in the majority of Southeastern states, but that is changing quickly, he pointed out. That’s because the minimum wage is being increased in California, he said.
As such, operating apparel production in the Southeast is going to be more cost effective than it will be in California going forward and will make more sense geographically, Wootten said. He opined that, in the Southeast, a significant quantity of fabric manufacturers are located there; the economic environment is much more business friendly; facility costs are typically cheaper and there is still a sizeable quantity of available buildings on the market; and government procurement of apparel has maintained the industry in the Southeast.
“I believe there are opportunities in the U.S. across a lot of product categories and telling that story is important,” Wootten concluded. “At the end of he day, other than some seamless knit programs, if we don’t have cut and sew operators, if we don’t have advancements in sewing technologies, then the U.S. supply chain ends because you can’t carry it to the next level, which is finished products that are being sold.”
Jeremy Wootten and his dad Jerry at the Texprocess Americas trade show in Atlanta in May.