Atro Sourcing offers a Supply Chain from Turkey, meaning buyers can find most of the fabrics, washing and embellishment needed for their garment requirements within the country, well known for its established textiles and fashion clothing manufacturing industry.
“Turkey can offer customers vertical manufacturing capability, which makes a real difference in delivery times,” says Kurt Salmon’s Rinnebach. “In addition to garment production, it has a strong heritage in textiles – it remains a top 10 producer of cotton, wool and polyester – and has fabric and knit production and finishing capability.” Breaking it down, Turkey exported $8.9bn knitted garments in 2015, $5.9bn in woven ready-wear and $1.9bn in ready-made clothing, figures from the Ministry of Economy indicate.
Platts says that over the past five years Asos has increasingly sourced a wider range of products in Turkey, leading to growth in the overall percentage of its production in the country. The retailer manufactures a range of clothing from basic jersey through to heavily embellished denim-washed products in and around Istanbul.
Its ability to produce a diverse range of products is one of the advantages of manufacturing there, says Platt: “The production capabilities are wide and the ability to understand and accommodate garments requiring quality and high fashion content are plentiful. There are manufacturers for denim, jersey, knitwear, tailoring, outerwear, swimwear, underwear, lingerie and many accessory types, including bags. It also has the specialist capabilities the supply base offers, with washing, embellishment and printing being key.”
As Turkish manufacturers are capable of producing a wide range of textiles and finishes, everything for garment production can be produced in the one country, providing a smoother and easier sourcing journey. So it is much more feasible to create a Supply Chain from Turkey than China.
“You don’t need to import from other countries,” says Altan, who champions the quality it offers compared with other regions. “The Far East has a completely different offer. It’s a cheap market – here we offer value-added garments. The quality is better than the Far East. And we have reliable factories and deliver on time and deliver quality.”
Karen Millen, which has a longstanding relationship of almost 20 years with Turkey, produces around 30% of its European clothing in the country. Turkish product is focused on tailoring, denim and a small amount of leather, Tear explains: “For tailoring, they have a very good tailored ‘handwriting’, which gives Karen Millen the clean, stamped-out, structured look. Our tailoring factories are CMT [cut, make, trim] which means we provide the patterns, fabric and trims, all the development work is completed here at Paul Street [Karen Millen’s headquarters in London], and they manufacture the product. For the denim, they have good Turkish denim mills, which give us premium denim.”