The Bay Area and the Northwest: riding the edge of tomorrow's trends

Bobbin, Sept, 1998 by Kathleen Desmarteau

At esprit, the past year has marked the transition from an in-house developed mainframe system to a best-of-breed software implementation. The company, which outsources 42 percent of its apparel production domestically and spreads its remaining non-apparel and apparel production across a variety of international locales, needed systems that could "change with the times," Damen says. Building interfaces between packages as it installed them, esprit chose Richter's RAMS package to streamline its order management and retail systems (esprit has 45 stores), Manhattan Associates' PkMS[R] software for distribution and Lawson software for its financial processes.

Going forward, esprit plans to focus attention on its e-commerce efforts, which will include accepting orders from a product catalog on its Web site, and developing an "e-form" that will enable it to conduct more electronic communication with smaller, specialty retailers who aren't yet doing EDI.

Fritzi California also "heartily embraces technology in every way we can," says Tandler. In addition to automating pattern, sample and marker making via Lectra Systems software, Fritzi has created its own line building and merchandising program, called Style-Up. Merchandisers use a digital camera to input images into the program, which is built in Microsoft Access. In addition, Fritzi is using Sony Systems' 2CONFER for video conferencing (including fit sessions) between operations, such as the San Francisco headquarters and manufacturing, design and distribution facilities in Vernon, CA.

Retail Roadblocks & Fierce Offshore Competition

When it boils down to it, the leading players in the industries of northern California and the Northwest, like their counterparts in other regions, must take a progressive approach to everything from IT to manufacturing to customer service to survive in an industry that definitely "is not for the weak of heart," as described by the SFFI's long-time executive director Randall Harris.

Harris, who has been affiliated with the San Francisco apparel industry since 1972, points to the seemingly unrestrained power of mammoth retailers as one of the greatest problems plaguing today's industry. He observes that these retail entities often dictate rock bottom prices for their private label work, which U.S. manufacturers may accept at minimal profit margins because they need the business. These same orders then may be subcontracted out to domestic shops which take on the work at a loss because they too are desperate to stay above water. And retailers' ever-dangling threats to take programs offshore - lock, stock and barrel - are all too real.

"It has this ripple effect that's really ugly," Harris laments. "It's changing the entire business paradigm for our industry, and I see it getting worse in the next five years."

To say that Harris' opinion is widely shared is an understatement. Manufacturers and contractors serving a variety of price points and markets are infuriated by what some have coined the "merchant-turned-mercenary" evolution of the modern-day retail giants.