Instead, he said, the road to Gaffney was all about protecting his bottom line. “When I framed the business, I wasn’t saying, ‘From the cotton in the ground to the finished product, this is going to be all American-made,’ ” he said. Winthrop did not run into such problems, monitoring worker safety in places like Bangladesh, where hundreds of textile workers have died in recent years in fires and other disasters, has become a huge challenge. Most striking, labor costs - the reason all these companies fled in the first place - aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.Īnd while Mr. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative.
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