China : Garment firms prefer imported fabrics to local product

A recent trade survey shows that clothing enterprises focus on 6 main reasons to express why they don’t like domestic fabrics, such as fabric style, hand feeling, color contrast, color fastness, defects and shrinkage.

(1) Fabric style Compared with imported products, domestic fabrics have fewer patterns, less new blended fabrics and could not master fashion trend. Domestic fabric makers are in need to develop imitated and thin fabrics.

(2) Shrinkage Comparing with imported fabrics, domestic fabrics show high rate of shrinkage. But the fabric quality from large enterprises is better than that from small and medium enterprises. In addition to that, the high rate of heating shrinkage impacts the combination of material with adhesive liner, therefore affects the surface quality of the product.

(3) Defects, color difference Defects are widely distributed, with poor markings and serious color difference. Recently domestic wool fabric manufacturers adopt the method of stripe dyeing and roll dyeing to correct the chromatic aberration and to improve the quality.

(4) Delivery Mostly imported fabrics are spot transactions, some transactions take the advantage of bonded warehouses for faster deliveries. Foreign-funded enterprises have been established in the domestic production of fabric section, specifically for the processing and garment export. Even in future goods, generally it takes 2 weeks to make a delivery from Hong Kong, and 2-3 weeks form South Korea, thus bringing a big impact on domestic fabric manufacturers, because it commonly takes 4-6 weeks for the domestic manufactures to make a delivery. Meanwhile they do not have enough flexibility. Though they have made some progress in this regard, they are still far behind the requirements of the apparel industry.

(5) Production batch Recently the growing tendency of garment production is of small-batch in more varieties, but domestic fabric manufacturers require a certain volume for each order. Fabric makers could not well meet the demand of garment makers. It has turned the garment makers to the spot market or wholesale market, so fashion designers could not fully express their personalized creation. Meanwhile it brings the disparity with the growing customized market demand. This phenomenon is most prominent in high-grade garments.

(6) Other factors The fringe of domestic fabrics could not be properly handled, it cannot meet the needs of garment production with CAD/CAM layout, for its poor finishing, inconsistent width, not enough colorful, and so forth.
 
 
Fibre2fashion, News Desk - China