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India’s apparel exports grew 31.7 per cent in April 2017 compared to the same period last year.
The main reason for this is the Rebate of State Levies (ROSL) on exports of garments. It helped the industry increase production at very competitive rates for a larger share of global markets.
During March to April 2017, Indian garment exporters were able to increase production by around 30 per cent for achieving this growth and employed at least five per cent more workers during the same period.
An overwhelming proportion of beneficiaries of the ROSL scheme are exporters with a turnover of less than Rs 10 crores a year.
The ROSL scheme was introduced in March 2017 initially for three years. The ROSL scheme is in tune with the recognized economic principle of zero rating of export products and in recognition of the fact that at present only central levies are rebated by way of drawback schemes.
Exporters want ROSL to be continued under the GST regime. They feel any dilution in the ROSL scheme will hit the apparel export sector badly, impacting job growth.
The ROSL benefit not only ensured Indian made-ups were competitive in the world markets but also encouraged Indian players to expand capacity to meet overseas demand.
Art Basel has slapped a lawsuit on Adidas. The lawsuit says that Adidas sneakers bear the Art Basel trademark without permission.
Art Basel is a famous art fest. Its name and mark have been used internationally since at least as early as 1999 in connection with art fair expositions around the world and related goods.
The art fest does license partners to use the Art Basel mark. Among these are internationally well-known entities such as BMW, Audemar Piguet watches, and Davidoff cigars. However Adidas does not happen to be on that list.
Art Basel claims that Adidas’ placement of the Art Basel mark on the sneakers, hang tags and boxes, which each also bear Adidas’ marks, deliberately misrepresents an association, show partnership, sponsorship or other affiliation between Art Basel and Adidas and misrepresents the origin of the sneakers.
It goes on to say that Adidas enjoyed the benefits of an exclusive license of the Art Basel mark without paying for or obtaining a license and, therefore, has been unjustly enriched through its unauthorized infringement of the mark.
This is ironical considering that over the last couple of years Adidas has been pursuing litigation and infringement-related lawsuits against the likes of Forever 21, Italian fashion brand Bally, Skechers and Marc Jacobs.
In a deal brokered by the Prince of Wales more than a dozen of the world’s biggest clothing and textile companies have signed a pledge to source 100 per cent sustainable cotton by 2025. The pledge was organised by The Prince of Wales’s International Sustainability Unit in collaboration with an objective to set a challenging target whereby brands and retailers can drive change in the industry. Participants to the sustainable cotton communiqué are: ASOS, Eileen Fisher, Greenfibres, H&M, IKEA, Kering, Levi Straus, Lindex, M&S, Nike, Sainsbury's, F&F at Tesco, and Woolworths Holdings. The pledge encourages retailers and brands to work with existing standards including organic, Fairtrade, and the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), to certify their sustainable cotton. The companies that pledged their support are at various stages of using sustainable cotton, with some just beginning and others, like Greenfibres, already securing all of their cotton from sustainable sources.
The pledge comes in the wake of the announcement that Marks and Spencer and Target have joined Cotton 2040, a new cross-industry initiative to make sustainable cotton a mainstream commodity. Companies who are looking to source sustainable cottonthis cotton 2040 attended the pledge meeting and are helping to communicate with the companies involved on which frameworks are available to companies.
With an additional 10 companies already looking to sign the pledge it will inspire a lot of companies to join, By declaring it publicly there is pressure to deliver says Melchett.
Melchett also commented that he and Marks and Spencer’s Mike Barry collaborated in the belief that improving the cotton supply chain would have a dramatic effect on the lives of some of the poorest farmers in the world and stated that consumers were most interested in the improvement sustainable cotton farming can have on farmers’ lives.
If sustainable cotton is to become the norm, the amount of sustainable cotton grown and bought needs to increase significantly. But pointed out that much organic cotton struggles to find buyers and is sold into the non-organic cotton supply chain.
"While President Trump is working hard to enhance domestic manufacturing, companies such as American Giant are working in tandem to give wings to this idea. The company is pushing manufacturing back to the US home ground. American Giant makes sure that everything in its clothing line is made domestically. The process starts with cotton grown and spun into yarn in the Carolinas. The head of American Giant, Bayard Winthrop, just doesn’t believe in delegating work."
While President Trump is working hard to enhance domestic manufacturing, companies such as American Giant are working in tandem to give wings to this idea. The company is pushing manufacturing back to the US home ground. American Giant makes sure that everything in its clothing line is made domestically. The process starts with cotton grown and spun into yarn in the Carolinas. The head of American Giant, Bayard Winthrop, just doesn’t believe in delegating work. He himself gets involved in production intricacies and frequently inspects his units to see everything is going well. The sources for cotton and yarn are domestic, and the company’s dying and sewing work is also done in the US.
New approach
American Giant, established in 2011, has embraced the rebirth of the ‘Made in America’ movement. Trevor Little, an apparel technology management expert at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles, has seen success come from the model American Giant is using. American Giant is looking at the whole cost and making smaller quantities and delivering quickly to consumers.
Similarly, Amazon too has its own line of products to compete with brands that are already on Amazon. So, competition is really heating up. On Amazon, one can find a wide variety of hoodies, in the range of $10 or $15. At the same time, American Giant believes that shoppers will continue to order its $89 classic full-zip cotton men’s hoodie. As far as the ‘focused line’ is concerned, the company makes only casual cotton clothes in mostly solid colors that are sold only online, with a lifetime guarantee and a higher price tag than your average chain store T-shirts and sweat pants.
Others follow similar approach
And it’s just not American Giant which is riding high on the domestic manufacturing, the workforce at Eagle Sportswear has almost doubled since it started sewing American Giant apparel, from 98 to nearly 200 workers. Brian Morrell, GM, Eagle Sportswear, says he didn’t want to make the American Giant line at first — too costly and too much needle work is involved but eventually changed his mind. But he continues to try and cut down on the amount of time it takes to make each hoodie. The company has increased efficiencies and changed some engineering. However, the fact is that US manufacturing companies are still figuring out how to make the best product in the least amount of time for an ever-changing consumer.
Making the business of fashion forecasts a touch easier, American international IBM rested their newest technology, IBM Watson to Indian designer duo Falguni and Shane Peacock, for their brand new collection centeredon the theme of ‘Future of Bollywood Fashion’.
IBM Watson searches through large pieces of data for patterns and insights, learning as it goes. Sriram Raghavan, director of IBM’s India Research Labs says that the company began by getting Watson to know fashion in a better way. He further stated that initially they were looking to make people’s retail experience better, and later these same building blocks were used in the design process. Watson understands colours, styles and silhouettes in a very significant way.
The technology, which runs on IBM Cloud, first examined about 6, 00,000 historical fashion runway images from London, New York, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks. It then continued to analyse about 5,000 images from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s Bollywood. The two pieces of research came together to spotlight exactly which trends worked during different periods of time in history, and which ones are going to be the most popular in the near future. On this Raghavan’s pointed out sharing his thought that Watson lets you travel visually over space and time. The company always talk about Watson assisting professional services nurses, doctors, and teachers. According to him what the company is doing for fashion designer is same like it’s done for a doctor and people don’t think of diagnosis as a creative task, they view it as a specialised task. On the other hand talking aboutenlarging the procedure with data and understandings the entire system has been authorizing the designer.
People who are fond of fashion over the world, IBM Watson may serve as ansuccessful time-saver, allowingto manufacture every fashion collection in lesser time. Today’s technology has even used in the whole thing from suggesting innovative food and to recognizing skin cancers, investment examination, and management of wealth.
India is expected to expand by 7.1 per cent year on year in the January-March quarter, just up from seven per cent in the prior quarter and ahead of China’s 6.9 per cent growth rate.
Some even expect a growth rate as high as 7.8 per cent.
The impact of GST is not clear -- some items are expected to be cheaper -- but the prospect of a price rise is seen pushing some people to buy ahead of July. Shoppers are bringing forward spending into the current quarter looking to avoid rates of 28 per cent, or higher, on some consumer durables and luxury items.
Layoffs in the information technology sector are unsettling some households at a time when the economy is still not generating enough new jobs for a workforce that is growing by around a million people a month.
Millions are thronging shopping malls and stores in India, thanks to a busy wedding season. In Asia’s third largest economy consumer spending has been traditionally a driver of growth.
Car sales, retail lending and goods imports show consumer spending has roared back to life after the November shock.
With a good monsoon and government pay hikes in prospect, the outlook for a sustained recovery looks good.
Walmart's closes the gap between itself and the online leader its acquisition of Jet.com and products that appeal to younger shoppers gave it an e-commerce boost. The world's largest retailer is betting on essentials like cereal and diapers, and has adjusted its shipping strategy to better compete with Amazon's Prime program. But Amazon keeps innovating too, implementing new technology and trying to make shopping more convenient.
Marc Lore, a co-founder of Jet.com who is now head of Walmart's U.S. online operations, says he's confident about the company's momentum and there's plenty of room for it to thrive.
He further stated in Jet headquarters in Hoboken, N.J that the company is happy with the results and moves that they are making. Since it is a big market, e-commerce sales industrywide are still growing 15 per cent per year he noted.
As Walmart prepares to show off some of its innovations this week before its shareholder meeting, there are signs that things are starting to click.Sales at Walmart.com rose 63 per cent in the first quarter, up from 29 per cent growth in the previous quarter and marking its fourth straight quarter of increases. Despite its acquisitions, Walmart says that a majority of the increase was through Walmart.com and was fuelled by changes in its shipping strategy and a discount for shoppers who pick up their online orders. Walmart now offers 50 million products including those from third-party sellers, up from 10 million a year ago. In comparison, Amazon has hundreds of millions of products.
David Spitz, CEO of e-commerce technology company Channel Advisor, points out saying that for some shoppers it has become ingrained that they start and finish their shopping at Amazon, and the Prime program reinforces that. He says Walmart wasn't putting a sufficient emphasis on keeping up.
According to Spitz ifthe gap was widening Jet.com was intended to be a jolt. Walmart is clearly being more aggressive. There is a sense of urgency, but whether that is enough is the multibillion-dollar question he added.
Amazon accounted for 33 per cent of U.S. online sales last year, according to the research firm Euromonitor. Walmart moved into second place ahead of eBay, with 7.8 per cent. Greg Melich, an analyst at research firm Evercore, estimates that Amazon customers spend an average of $800 annually on the site.
As per Melich, If Amazon's relationship with Prime members continues to grow, then Amazon's path toward Walmart's nine per cent of the total U.S. retail market from its current three per cent is reasonable.
Textile products from Uzbekistan may receive customs privileges in EU countries.The customs privileges apply to processing, supplying and transit of Uzbek textile products to EU countries.
Up till now, the most favored nation treatment as part of the partnership and cooperation agreement was not applied to the import of textile products from Uzbekistan. There was also a double licensing system when issuing permits for the import of textile products from Uzbekistan to the EU.
Cotton is one of Uzbekistan’s most important industries. The World Bank has launched a new program in Uzbekistan in order to help cotton farmers improve their production efficiency, safeguard the environment, and improve labor practices.
Uzbekistan has complied with the requirement to eradicate child labor in cotton harvesting.
EU-Uzbekistan relations date back to 1991, when the European Commission launched the Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Since 2007, the EU has been delivering increasing development support to Uzbekistan. Moreover, the country benefits from specific expertise in the area of higher education. The EU cooperation program supports, through its development programs, relevant policy reforms and national strategies.
Uzbekistan benefits from support under the EU-Central Asia regional program. Uzbekistan currently participates in two EU-Central Asia regional programs which address cross border challenges.
International fast fashion retailer Uniqlo has announced plans to continue its expansion into Queensland, by opening a fourth store in the state later this year This new store, located in Brisbane’s northern suburb of Chermside, will cover an area of 792 square metres and is expected to create over 50 jobs in the local area.
Uniqlo Chermside will be the thirteenth store for the company in Australia since entering the market in 2014, and the fourth in Queensland in two years. The brand have also announced that the full Life Wear range for women, men, children and babies will be made available in-store.
On opening its first store in Queensland 2015 Uniqlo Australia COO Kenji Tsuji shared his thought saying that the decision to open the store was easy, quoting the positive reaction the brand had received from customers in Queensland.
The brand havebeen receiving a very positive response from local shoppers who have loved the wide range of every-day products and innovative fabrics that are sold.
Tsuji further stated that It made sense to continue to expand the brands presence in the region, and they are thrilled to be able to make the Uniqlo brand more accessible for shoppers across Queensland.
Growing up in Manhattan Eric Sauma spent most weekends accompanying his father to work at Mood Fabrics to help hand out flyers. On most days, what would normally be a quick jaunt across a few city blocks would take nearly 45 minutes, as throngs of people would stop his father to talk shop or say a quick hello. If you worked in fashion, Jack Sauma was the man to know. On any given day, Eric’s father was accosted by aspiring designers, businessmen and manufacturers from all walks of life, as trucks whizzed by in the background carrying garments and hundreds of workers walked the streets pushing carts filled with fabric.
For reality television enthusiasts, Mood likely evokes scenes from the fabric store Project Runway. According to Eric Mood is the family business that he runs alongside Philip his brother. Eric have now dramatically quelled.
Now the garment district is under even more duress as the result of a proposed redistricting plan put into action by Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s administration, with the support of the Council of Fashion Designers of America that has the potential to relocate the area to Brooklyn.
Talking about the transformation of the garment district designer Yeohlee Teng got her start in the garment district in 1981, selling her first collection to Bergdorf Goodman. During that time she found factory space available on 37th Street. More than three decades later, she still produces in the district, just a couple streets away on 35th Street.
Fashion jobs in the district began to diminish as designer’s outsourced production overseas in search of cheaper rates over the years. In 1987, there were 30,000 manufacturing jobs in the garment district. It was protected by zoning laws that prevented real estate moguls from buying up factory space and flipping it into luxury real estate. At present there are just 5,000 workers occupying the same space, and discussions have percolated over lifting overlay zoning that protects garment businesses on side streets in the area.
