Made in SA: The Foschini Group has invested in local clothing manufacturing such as at the Prestige factory in Cape Town. Photo: Dwayne Senior/Getty Images
A few years ago while in Johannesburg, Graham Choice, founder of Prestige Clothing and now The Foschini Group (TFG) managing director of merchandise supply chain, visited the St Vincent School for the Deaf.
“I walked into this school of multicultural kids from grade R to matric … and they were all deaf,” said Choice.
“We decided to offer sewing classes to the pupils of St Vincent. TFG donated sewing machines and painted a classroom TFG’s corporate colours for the lessons. The pupils took to sewing like ducks to water.
“When they matriculated, the principal called us to say, ‘What’s the next level? What now?’ We hadn’t thought of the next level.”
So TFG looked for a place to set up a factory to employ the pupils. “We wanted to start a modern T-shirt plant.”
They partnered with Bidvest Industrial to use their warehouse in Hillbrow and transformed it into “something really incredible”.
“Today there are 127 deaf, young people working in the factory. There are only a few hearing people in the building, who all use sign language,” Choice said.
Rewind to 2008 when Choice, who had founded Prestige in 1989, came to a point where the factory in Maitland had reached its optimum size and needed to expand.
“I heard there was some redundant machinery available in the farming town, Caledon, two hours from Cape Town.”
In the town’s industrial area there was an old shed and Choice asked the municipality to let him use it to train unemployed people. “They gave it to me rent free for the first year, and thereafter for a nominal amount.
“So, in 2008, we started the factory with eight people. We painted the inside, modernised the building, ensured it was compliant and bought modern machinery. There was lots of human capital invested in the building. Management and the workers were trained on site.”
Today the plant in Caledon — the home of Sportscene’s Redbat brand — manufactures four and a half million garments annually, and produces clothing for Markham and Foschini; “fleece in the winter and T-shirts in summer”.
Aside from the farms, the factory is Caledon’s largest employer.
“Today, there are 850 young people working in the Caledon factory, at an average age of 27 — and they train up nearly 100 learners on a NQF Level 2 learnerships a year.”
The factory has solar on the roof, and its machines are all green and efficient. The town had no public transport for the workers so TFG put in its own transport network for the factory workers.
There is a new settlement bordering Caledon today that is almost entirely related to the factory.
The Hillbrow and Caledon factories are examples of how TFG has proven that building successful factories in impoverished areas is possible.
“If you really want to employ South Africans, that’s the way to do it. If you have an environment that’s airy, clean, well-organised, with modern machinery, you can train young people to a competency not even they can believe,” Choice said.
“If you lead them well, they’ll become productive. Caledon, for example, is delivering higher margins and with far shorter lead times than imports from China. And controlling your local production also ultimately means you can have a higher degree of confidence over your supply chain compliance.”
Choice, who was born and raised in the Cape, started his career in the clothing manufacturing industry in the early 1980s. After founding Prestige in 1989, the company grew from a micro enterprise of six people to a large company, which TFG acquired in 2012 to establish their local scalable, quick-response manufacturing supply chain.
TFG was deliberate in its intent with a quick-response manufacturing strategy. “In about 2004, we started looking at the industry from a different viewpoint. Traditionally, clothing manufacture was being benchmarked as one of the least efficient processes globally. The idea was if you took the methodology from efficient industries and integrated that into apparel manufacturing, we could become more efficient. So Prestige started running a lean, quick-response process.
“From taking one and a half weeks for a garment to move down a 25-man production line from start to finish, we brought it down to less than four hours. This allows buying decisions to be made far later in the process.”
“The traditional buying pattern is six months out of China. If you buy something today, it will arrive in your stores six months from now. With our local quick response capability, we are able to get the product into stores in a matter of weeks.”
Today, Prestige Caledon and Hillbrow are two of five plants owned by TFG and part of more than R1 billion they have invested into building capacity to make garments locally.
Reversing the trend
All this has started to reverse an historic industry-wide disinvestment in local clothing manufacturing. The factories are in Maitland, Caledon, Epping, Durban and Johannesburg, and fall within TFG’s Quick Response manufacturing capability along with other independently-owned strategic partners.
“Our TFG Prestige factories currently employ around 4 000 people, while the non-owned ones employ around 2 000 people — notwithstanding all the associated jobs created around those factories.”
The result has been a considerable increase in locally-made clothes in TFG’s stores — for example in Foschini, The Fix, Exact, Markham and Fabiani — far from the days when the bulk of the stock was made in Asia because of lower costs and cheaper labour.
TFG’s focus is to support the belief that the clothing and textile industry can once again become the Western Cape’s largest employer.
Choice believes there’s no village or town that cannot become a Caledon.
TFG’s Prestige Caledon factory typically employs youth aged 17 to 25.
“They are offered a national qualification in clothing, which entails a classroom period for eight to 12 weeks depending on the elective of the learnership and thereafter given practical training for nine months. Some people think, with automated machinery, you can train somebody in three weeks — but there is so much more to it than just the equipment training. There is a core curriculum that includes occupational health and safety, and a lot of learning focused on TFG and its business values, what is expected of them as well as other skills training.”
In 2017, TFG’s Quick Response Supply chain produced six million garments; in 2023, it will produce 17 million; and it plans to grow that to 24 million in the next three years.
Choice said, “We look forward to continuing this build out, not least for the additional jobs that it will bring both within our owned factories but also in our non-owned strategic partners and the supply chain.”