A Flashback Production Post, Shenzhen – Guangzhou: Part 1

About to take the Guangzhou airport shuttle

The following paragraphs are being written from memory, pre active blog, before we decided it would be wise to document and share our journey of many paths.

Cross walk by the place we stayed at, Tianhe Bei Lu

The basic itinerary of the trip went like this:
Day 1: Arrive in Guangzhou, rest up and caught up with our friends in the city.
Day 2: Travel to Shenzhen by train early in the morning, we visited several fabric companies in the morning then had some great lunch. The remainder of the day was spent viewing our main production factory and then late afternoon to late at night was spent editing garments in the meeting room.
Day3: Back in Guangzhou, visited several fabric store/market areas.
Day4: Checked out some of the regular garment markets to see if there were any B-Grades around, suss out the production scope around there.
Day5: Guangzhou textile center, too big to describe, just huge, overwhelming.
Day6: Relaxing before we leave back to Singapore.

Throw some drinking and crazy cab rides in there as well then sprinkle some good eating and parties around too.

Train station at Guangzhou

Our production centers are in Shenzhen and Bangkok; Shenzhen is where our wovens get made and Bangkok is where our jersey pieces get made. Shenzhen plays a very important role with sifr since the majority of our first collection is wovens. I know a lot of people mention about the stigma that goes hand in hand with production in China but believe us we tried to find the best possible production for our garments without compromising one of our core values, accessibility. We’ve done our research on production in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and Indonesia so far. If we went with production out of Japan or Korea we’d have to move our price points up 150 –200% at the least. With currency exchange rates and cost of labor there is a reason why companies end up charging the consumer $250 onwards for a garment that is made in Japan. Southeast Asian textile and production industry exists very much so but in terms of quality control, communication and finding solid production centers we were out of luck. We’ll continue to keep searching the region as we delve deeper into our sourcing investigation leads. As our never ending sourcing quest leads us to the production center of the world at the moment, China.

Street busker with child

To be continued in Part 2.