Value fashion retail giant Primark has opened three new stores in the United States.

The target is to reach 60 US stores by 2026. As of now there are a total of 16 US stores and a worldwide tally of 411 stores. Primark first entered the US in 2015,introducing its products to a myriad Americans, thirsty for its everyday low price model, a system different from the majority of other US retailers who operate with extensive discounting, promotions and coupons. The Irish retailer continues to pursue the American dream at a slow pace. The US market is the biggest market in terms of fashion sales and one of the most complex alongside the high competition.

Primark is a company that only operates with physical stores amid an era driven by digitalization and e-commerce. The Irish fast fashion chain’s jeans collection designed in line with the Ellen MacArthur Jeans Redesign guidelines uses organic cotton and recycled content. The collection meets all of the Jeans Redesign standards, with adult jeans in the collection made from either 70 per cent organic cotton, 29 per cent recycled cotton and one per cent elastane, or 70 per cent organic cotton and 30 per cent recycled cotton. Children’s jeans are made of 78 per cent organic cotton, 20 per cent recycled cotton and two per cent elastane.

Bangladesh Denim Expo was held November 15 to 16, 2022.

It was a grand event showcasing the entire value chain, creating a platform for connecting with people who love, appreciate, and care for denim.The trade show featured businesses from around the world spanning textiles, machinery, and technology, with a focus on sustainability. The event hosted renowned global denim manufacturers, industry leaders, sustainability practitioners, and the latest technology adopters from all around the world,brought businesses together, enabled meaningful collaborations, and kept participants updated with global denim fashion trends and manufacturing techniques.

Denim offers Bangladesh great prospects. Bangladesh’s next business is denim. With the huge demand from global retailers and brands, the country has established some 30 denim mills. These meet 40 per cent of the demand for denim fabrics from garment makers. The remaining demand is met through imports, mainly from China, India, Turkey and Pakistan.Bangladesh has overtaken China in denim supply to the EU countries because of quality products at competitive prices.Due to the focus on sustainability Bangladesh denim fabric makers have dramatically reduced water consumption over the last few years with the adoption of the latest technologies in production. The target is to reduce water consumption by 80 per cent in the denim making process.

UK retail sales volumes rose by 0.6 per cent in October 2022 compared to the previous month.

So says the Office for National Statistics. The value of retail sales rose 1.8 per cent compared to the previous month. Looking purely at volumes and on a month-on-month basis, increases were seen in all of the main sectors apart from food stores. Non-food stores sales volumes rose by 1.1 per cent. Clothing stores sales volumes rose by 2.5 per cent month on month but were 3.7 per cent below their February 2020 levels. And department stores volumes fell by 0.3 per cent. The proportion of retail sales taking place online was 26.1 per cent, a broadly consistent level since May 2022.

Online sales of textiles, clothing and footwear were down 8.4 per cent compared to a year ago and down 2.7 per cent compared to September, while department store sales online were down 6.8 per cent compared to a year ago and 1.7 per cent against the previous month. But although there was an uptick in retail sales last month, driven by clothing, a bleak winter lies ahead and consumers are looking at how they can tackle the fallout from the cost-of-living crisis in their spending decisions. There’s still little sign of early Christmas cheer for retailers.

A conference on technical textiles was held in New Delhi, November 16, 2022.

Companies exhibited a wide range of protective textile products. Panel discussions in the conclave covered the prospect of indigenisation of protective textile products in India, experience and expectations of consumers towards adoption of Indian protective textiles and market promotion and export opportunities of protective textiles in India along with global best practices.The technical textile industry is a sunrise industry with a robust growth rate of ten per cent annually. However, the sector is still small in size and there is a lot of opportunity for India to be a prominent player in the global arena.

So the need of the hour is to focus on product diversification, design, aesthetics as well as the need for training the manpower involved. Efforts are being made to develop and implement standards for technical textile items and produce and market quality products that are at par with international standards. The National Technical Textiles Mission has undertaken initiatives such as supporting R&D projects in niche and strategic protech areas. Guidelines will be formulated to support and create an education ecosystem and skilled workforce in the field of technical textiles with the development of new courses and laboratory infrastructure in technical textilesto promote the growth of technical textiles in India.

The International Apparel Federation (IAF) is aiming at a fairer distribution of risk and reward between buyers and producers.

IAF is a global network uniting small and medium manufacurers, brands, manufacturers and their associations. When western brands collapsed during the Covid pandemic, one of the first things they did was to cancel already completed orders.As buyers cancelled orders, suppliers were left in a lurch. They had to sink or swim. The IAFhas identified the need to urgently rebuild trust and has begun emphasising on supply chain issues guided by the urgency of the need for industry transition in a changed world. IAF believes the supply chain, to function well, literally and figuratively speaking, needs a new contract and needs to operate with a greater sense of equity.

So IAF has teamed up with the Star Network of industry associations, GIZ, Better Buying and the OECD in a project in which around ten associations will build their recommendations for payment and delivery terms. Even though intentions are often good, purchasing practices are more an offer by buyers. The financial flows fuelling the supply chain including a fairer distribution of risk and reward are a major part of this new contract and IAF is developing both guidance and concrete services to its members in this area. Another way IAF is preparing for the new world is by adapting to the policies and core values which will gain significance but will come at a steep cost. IAF feels that as the essence to the greening of the industry is a supply-chain-wide collaborative approach, pledges to reduce CO2 emissions are important but not sufficient and that costs and the rewards of transformation need to be shared in the supply chain.

So the financial sector can bridge gaps, education across the supply chain will help and consumers can drive change though they need to be able to base their buying decisions on clear and trustworthy green claims. The organisation notes circularity – the practice of encouraging reuse, recycling, or sustainability in consumption, manufacturing – as the most effective method to reduce the pressure on climate exerted by the apparel industry.At the same time, IAF will focus on bringing the manufacturers' voice more clearly into the global industry infrastructure that is being built to reduce apparel's global environmental footprint.

Other priorities

The IAF's other priorities are working on institutional infrastructure, education and training, digitisation and transparency. It believes the apparel industry needs a better global, institutional industry infrastructure, promoting more inclusivity and that this can be done by reducing audit and standard fatigue.IAF and the International Textile Manufacturers Federation have taken up a project to do this.In line with its aim to build a stronger global institutional infrastructure for the industry, IAF will also work to enhance global coordination of industry education.

Global coordination implies alignment of priorities, quality and efforts to reduce the chances of overlap. IAF is working with several multilateral organisations to organise a more structured transfer of knowledge aimed particularly at industry associations.The IAF will also stress on all-out, all-forces-joined drive for digitization and has emphasised on the need to accelerate efforts to increase transparency of its supply chains since transparency is important to create more responsive supply chains, to improve sustainability and is needed to comply with demands of civil society and government.

IAF's mission is to unite all stakeholders of the fashion and apparel industry, including brands, retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and country associations from around the world to enable and promote smarter, stronger, more sustainable supply chains.Buyers’ conduct at the start of the pandemic often was the exact opposite of collaboration and the breach of trust created caused damage to supply chains that needs to be repaired. IAF has formulated a strategy for strengthening supply chains that will help repair this damage, prevent new damage and contribute to the creation of a stronger, smarter and more sustainable industry.

Colombo Fashion Week’s Luxury Edition opened November 17, 2022

The effort is to showcase Sri Lanka’s talented fashion designers and the event featured luxury, occasion, and bridal trousseau segments by eight designers who had created their collections.The latest edition has emphasised on looking for resources available in Sri Lanka to create garments by changing the narrative and manufacturing materials available in the crisis-hit island nation.Sri Lanka’s fashion industry is facing a lack of young professionals since 2019 as many aspiring individuals are moving away due to the challenges faced by them following the Easter Sunday attack, the pandemic, and an unprecedented economic crisis. The industry has been in the process to improve globally lucrative ventures in the last decade, but the challenges have reversed the gains. A lot of young designers are going into big apparel companies. Sri Lanka was predominantly influenced by apparel manufacturing and so Colombo Fashion Week wants to rediscipline the whole cycle, inspire youngsters to take to fashion and take to design and give them the curriculum and the work to give them the right mindset.Economic crisis has hit the imports of fashion designing materials with only a few materials available within Sri Lanka like accessories and fabrics. Imports of nearly 50 percent of the designing materials have been banned as the country’s central bank wants to save dollars in the face of an acute foreign exchange shortage.

The global crisis as a result of the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war is being felt by the textile industry in Indonesia.

Indonesia’s textile exports have dropped dramatically after the Russia-Ukraine war. The loss of this export market has made textile companies in Indonesia overstock.

On the other hand, the domestic market is not available since it is flooded with imported products. So this condition causes domestic textile products to go nowhere and the impact of which has been that textile companies in Indonesia are experience overstock.

This has also caused textile companies to take policies to lay off their employees. In just 16 days, more than 85,000 employees throughout Indonesia have been laid off. It is difficult to predict when the textile industry in Indonesia will recover from the current crisis caused by the war. The recession can be said to have begun. If domestic demand revives the export market that is currently missing can be replaced and textile companies in the country can survive. The industry feels that suppression of imports, especially the flood of illegal imports of used clothes, can help textile enterprises to revive.

In the third quarter of 2022, Indonesia’s textile industry grew by eight per cent year on year.

Schoeller is using Nativa wool to make fabrics. Nativa is the first global wool brand to provide blockchain traceability from farm to consumer. This transparency in the supply chain, enabled by the Nativa certification and powered by blockchain, means brands can truly show the journey of their wool. A unique QR code is generated for each product of each brand. This code is a connection between the Nativa blockchain platform and the Nativa blockchain website. Customers can scan the QR code to view the website, where they can trace in real time the journey of their wool, from farm to brand.

Nativa wool comes from certified farms in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, North America, Uruguay and Argentina. The farms comply with strict levels of animal welfare, and management and ethical work policies. To ensure animal welfare each farmer has a management plan, assessing feeding, breeding, behaviour, animal handling and health and infrastructure. This includes the prohibition of mulesing and stress-free shearing. All following steps such as wool sourcing, combing, spinning and weaving are also monitored and certified to the highest ethical and quality standards.

The use of materials produced in a conscious and environmentally friendly manner is of fundamental importance to Schoeller, which fulfills its responsibility toward humans, animals and the environment with great care. Therefore, the company has chosen to collaborate with Nativa.

Digital Textile Printing Conference will take place in the US, December 7 to 8, 2022.

What started as an experimental collaboration has become an annual event. Now in its seventh consecutive year, the event connects leaders and innovators in the digital textile printing community.

There is something for everyone at this year’s event – direct-to-garment, home décor, design, screen printing, sustainability, and more. This year’s Digital Textile Printing Conference features a packed agenda highlighting notable speakers, networking receptions, lunches, and an exhibitor space where attendees can explore new technology and products. The event’s theme is Driving Digital Textile Transformation … Go! which reflects in the overarching common thread of the thought-provoking presentations that will be presented by industry thought leaders across the two days.

There will be sessions on business growth and digital textiles, textile industry updates, empowering the print community to better understand the interior design industry, on demand direct print, digital product passports, formulating pigment inkjet inks for fashion and apparel applications, computer to screen applications for garment printing, digital textile printing as an artistic medium, performing color process control in digital textile printing, advances in digital textile manufacturing. Tabletop exhibits and networking breaks are key benefits of the Digital Textile Printing Conference.

Pakistan’s textile exports fell by 15 percent in October 2022 on a year on year basis. On a month on month basis, textile exports fell 11 percent in October 2022 compared to September 2022.The country’s textile exports declined by one percent during the first four months of the current fiscal year compared to the same period of last year.

Cotton yarn exports fell 27 percent during the first four months of the current fiscal year. On a year on year basis, cotton yarn exports fell 53 percent while on a month on month basis they fell by 35 percent. Raw cotton exports grew 100 percent during the first four months of the current fiscal year on a year on year basis.The country’s overall exports during the first four months of the fiscal grew by one percent compared to the same period last fiscal.

Exports in October 2022 fell two per cent compared to September 2022 and by three percent compared to October 2021.The main commodities of exports during October 2022 were knitwear, readymade garments, bedwear, cotton cloth, rice, towels, madeup articles, fish and fish preparations, rice basmati and cotton yarn.