The Valdese, N.C.-based company, the second largest home furnishings textile mill in the world, employs nearly 1,000 people in Burke County and operates 750,000 square feet of manufacturing space at four production facilities, he noted. A design studio at its corporate headquarters creates fashions that are manufactured at its Main Plant (package dyeing and weaving), Crescent Plant (yarn dyeing, warping and slashing), Lovelady Plant (finishing, quality assurance testing, distribution) and Circa Plant (yarn prep).

 

Valdese Weavers manufactures 6,000 yards of fabric per day and 15 million yards per year, producing $150 million in annual sales, Copeland said.
 

“But what you’re going to hear about today is mostly about relationships and people,” Copeland said early in his remarks. “We have intimate relationships with our customers, vendors and associates. That’s what makes Valdese Weavers successful.”

 

The company strongly believes in its employees, so much so that it recently announced that it had become a 100 percent employee-owned company, through its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), he said. And that puts Valdese Weavers in rare company, he added: Of 5.7 million U.S. companies, only 9,000 are ESOP firms, he pointed out.

 

Copeland noted that the move helps the company meet the objectives of the Shuford family, who had owned the company since the Great Depression. Among those objectives is to provide long-term employment, better compensation and a continuity of leadership, he added. The ESOP offers the opportunity to share ownership and align company goals with associates’ goals, he said.

 

“Our employees are our most precious resource,” he said.

 

The company focuses on operational excellence, which has led to capital investments in technology to improve profitability and remain competitive, Copeland said.

 

“We have a culture of change and an expectation for excellence,” he said. “As such, we’re proactive in our industry.”

 

Highlighting its vertical manufacturing system is a computerized yarn-dyeing operation, a studio-to-loom weaving operation, a world-class finishing operation and manufacturing facilities that are adaptable to the ebbs and flows of the market, he said.

 

The company distributes around the globe through two primary business segments: residential and contract. Residential end uses include upholstery, drapery, outdoor and multi-purpose, while the contract side includes privacy curtains, cubicles and panels, upholstery and flame-retardant drapery.

 

Its brands include Valdese Weavers, Valdese Weavers Contract, Circa 1801, Valdese International Products (VIP), Wesley Mancini and Dicey Fabrics.

 

Interestingly, each year the company sells 7,865 patterns, creates 27,475 SKUs, runs 237 yarn types and 674 finishes and handles 1,627 custom requests.

 

Valdes Weavers, which uses ISO 9000/9001, SAP process controls and Lean Manufacturing principles, has a 93.7 percent on-time delivery, Copeland said. Its SAP process controls links all of its business processes with real-time information, he added.

Additionally, all fabrics undergo extensive on-site testing from raw materials to finished fabrics, he noted.

 

Under Armour: ‘Go big or go home’

 

Meanwhile, Keith Hoover, vice president of Material Innovation for Under Armour, offered a provocative presentation titled, “Lighthouse Thinking: A Call To Arms.” He covered the reshoring of America, providing a brief history of how we got here and how his brand company is working to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

 

Hoover called the offshoring movement, which virtually ended the vertical manufacturing model, the “Devil’s deal.” By dispersing manufacturing globally, orders had to be placed six to 12 months in advance, and the risks were a disconnect between ordered supply/projected demand and fewer turns, he said.

 

The result? Shuttered U.S. factories as production moved overseas to developing nations, access to low-cost labor and a non-existent regulatory burden and a shift of the economic burden to makers until goods were received, he said.

 

U.S. apparel industry employment fell by 72.6 percent to 148,100 employees between 1998 and 2012, Hoover noted. In addition, Americans bought 24,290,000,000 square meter equivalents (SMEs) of apparel in 2013, with 97.5 percent of those good being imported.

 

Considering those facts, two things are clear, Hoover said: 1) The global manufacturing landscape is rapidly changing; and 2) Brands need shorter lead times.

 

“The disconnect between projected and actual demand is too great, with no means to react,” he said.

 

In China, high labor turnover, a declining manufacturing labor force, a growing middle consumer-based middle class and substandard working conditions, in many instances, portends a coming change, he said.

 

“Labor is not low enough to make up for distance, time and uncertainty,” Hoover said.

 

Hoover made note of the U.S. government’s solution to the issue, which is the creation of the recently announced Revolutionary Fibers & Textiles Manufacturing Innovation Institute (RFT-MII). But that entity, aimed at developing smart fabrics and organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) Alliance umbrella, represents only a small portion of the pie, he pointed out.

 

Fashion and sports apparel accounts for only 25 percent of smart fabrics and, by far the largest sector included in that mix, it also is the most cost sensitive, according to Hoover. Critical mass for smart fabrics is dependent on significant adoption in apparel, and military/government applications are assumed to parallel sports apparel – except for cost, he said.

 

To illustrate, he showed a slide indicating that smart fabric apparel represents only 0.004 percent ($457,680,000) of the global sales total ($1,110,000,000,000) of apparel.

 

“So that by definition is a niche product, if there ever was one,” Hoover said. “What AFFOA Is focusing on is smart fibers and smart textiles, but what they’re forgetting about is smart fibers and textiles have to go into garments, which have to be constructed – and that’s what we lack. So it’s a five-year catalyst that will produce maybe a study that says more research is needed. But I don’t think that it’s going to accomplish the goals of returning an industry to the U.S.”

 

So Under Armour developed its own solution by recently opening its UA Lighthouse manufacturing and design innovation center in Baltimore that creates a local-for-local solution Hoover said. The 35,000 square-foot facility will be the proving grounds for developing new, cutting-edge products and efficient manufacturing processes, he added. The new model adopts or develops technology, optimizes the use of direct labor and encompasses a new sourcing strategy, he pointed out.

 

Hoover called the local-for-local model “the difference between a niche and an industry.”

 

The model, he said, provides a distributed network of quick-turn, efficient contract factories driving speed to market and rapid replenishment; supports both conventional and smart industry needs; and replaces the remnants of the mandated local-for-local (Berry Amendment) textile industry with market-driven local for local.

 

Hoover defined the concept as “technological re-employment,” opining that: new manufacturing technology and processes create new business opportunities and new jobs; solving the “cut-and-sew problem” motivates investment in new industries AND unleashes unprecedented growth for the rest of the apparel supply chain; and it shifts the focus to total profit, not predicted margin.

 

Such a model will allow the U.S. to compete for global market share of a very large pie, he added.

 

“Recapturing 10 percent of the imports translates into 300,000 more jobs,” Hoover said. “(The model) builds a dual-purpose infrastructure for the emerging smart fabric market.”

 

“The biggest challenge we face is thinking too small,” he added. “We own 2.5 percent of the industry. Why wouldn’t we want to own 90 percent?”

 

Later, Hoover said we are reaching a critical point, “where those in the government will see this as a viable option or won’t see it as a viable option. When you think about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and this RFI-MII thing, the government has a split personality. On one hand, they want to foster the return of textiles to the U.S., but on the other hand they want to foster cheaper textiles coming into the U.S. from our competition. Well, you can’t have it both ways.

 

“Under Armour has decided we’re going to invest millions of dollars into making this happen,” he continued. “We’re going to be partnering with you over the next few years as we build this. Our competitors are thinking the same thing. A lot of the major brands are looking for ways to drive it. I’m fortunate to work for a great leader like (founder, CEO and Chairman) Kevin Plank with a great vision at Under Armour. And our focus is ‘you go big or you go home.’ ”

 

Other speakers

 

Michael Cable, public relations lead for Wray Ward advertising agency, apprised attendees of the National Council of Textile Organizations’ (NCTO’s) rebranding campaign. The industry’s national lobbying group hired the Charlotte, N.C., firm last year to create an industry rebranding initiative to paint an accurate picture of the 21st century U.S. textile and apparel industry to the media, policymakers and consumers.

 

The campaign, called “We Make Amazing,” was launched in April and features printed collateral, billboards, social media components and more. The campaign also entails pitching good stories to the media and inviting lawmakers into industry facilities.

 

“I can’t tell you how much this excites me,” said Cable, a former TV reporter. “We can ‘re-image’ this industry to people who are influencers.”

 

Cable stressed how important it is to have collaborative, industry-wide participation. He asked the audience to send in good stories that can be used to portray a positive image, and work directly with the media to get those stories in front of the general populace.

 

“The only way this is going to work effectively is if we have participation,” he said.

 

Meanwhile, Robert Carrigg, international trade specialist with the Office of Textiles & Apparel International Trade Administration (OTEXA) in the U.S. Department of Commerce, presented an overview of U.S. textile trade policy and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He noted the 20 free trade agreements are already in place between the U.S. and other countries, pointing out that 15 of them have been enacted since 2002.

 

OTEXA is a resource that provides industry research and analysis, promotes made in the USA, executes U.S. textile and apparel trade policy and develops supply chain and sourcing strategies, he said.

 

Carrigg also provided some numbers related to U.S. textile and apparel shipments and imports, before delving into the textile chapter elements of the 12-country TPP, which has yet to come up for a vote in Congress. He also dove deeper into the rule of origin, market access, partner tariff commitments and safeguard provisions.