In one of the most dynamic fashion markets in the world, Brazilian apparel companies have many opportunities in front of them. But along with rapid growth comes challenges. The national appetite for fresh fashion is requiring retailers to offer more variety, frequent style changes, and higher levels of quality and value.
To meet growing demand for its fashionable jeans and sportswear, family-owned Macklife Confecções turned to state-of-the-art technology from Eton Systems to transform its Maringá-based factory into a model for retail-driven manufacturing.
From factory floor to store shelf
Since opening with a jeans line in 1988, Macklife has experienced solid sales growth that today includes a variety of tops and bottoms under the For Boys and For Girls labels targeting a 15 to 40 year old fashion audience. The company sells only through its own stores, which now number 15 in Parana, 2 in São Paulo, and plans to open at least one more in 2013. The company’s 400 in-house production workers make about 80% of the 900,000 units it sells each year.
“We believe that selling through our own stores is our most important competitive advantage”, explaines Macklife Co-Owner and Director Petterson Nabhan. “In addition to offering excellent quality and value in our products, we carefully choose the store location and then pay very close attention to making sure we stock the products that our customers want.”
To create a more responsive production process, the company installed the Eton 5000 computerized conveyor and production management system to speed garments through the assembly and finishing processes in a fraction of the time required for the industry standard progressive bundle system. This ability to respond quickly allows Macklife stores to communicate sales trends to the factory and get new or replenishment merchandise faster than their competition.
Responsive and efficient manufacturing
As Macklife has added new styles and stores to seize market opportunities, the factory has adapted to the changing realities of today’s fashion industry. Large orders of a single product stretching over long periods of time have given way to more frequent and smaller individual production orders.
To simplify day to day management in this challenging environment, Eton Systems keeps work-in-process inventories very lean to limit the number of orders on the production floor at any given time. The ETONselect real-time shop floor computer system helps Macklife concentrate their efforts on fewer orders as each quickly flows through the production line in a more orderly and manageable fashion.
Since installing 60 high-tech Eton workstations in late 2010, the vertical retailer has significantly increased its production capabilities. By eliminating most of the non-productive handling, the new system enables workers to produce more with less effort. The computer controls help team leaders focus on processing the right orders quickly and completely for delivery to the stores.
“We have always seen technology as the way to stay ahead of our competition. Investing in the Eton system has given us a tremendous advantage as we can now produce 50% more units with the same amount of people”, says Nabhan.
Affordable, high quality fashion
A visit to a Macklife store reinforces the company’s commitment to making fashion affordable to its customers. Of course, having the right products on the shelf at the right time plays a big role in keeping costs low.
Because keeping prices low is central to its continued success, controlling production costs has always been an active pursuit at Macklife. In addition to reducing handling time and costs, the Eton conveyor delivers all the parts for a single pant or shirt in a specially designed carrier that presents them in the most ergonomic manner for each operation. Many operations can be performed without ever removing the pant or shirt from the clamp.
“The opportunity to reduce product costs was one of the first things that attracted us to the system”, continues Nabhan. “With Eton, we have reduced the cost of manufacturing our jeans by 20%.”
As customer expectations for product quality continue to increase, the fast pace of production with Eton Systems helps Macklife find and resolve quality issues quickly and more effectively than ever before. In contrast to a progressive bundle system where large quantities sit in queues for the next operation, the Eton system automatically advances individual units to the next operation at the click of a button. This prevents stacks of defective items from being sewn before problems are detected. Computer controls on the system also make it simple to track problems back to their origin so corrective measures can be taken before major quality problems develop.
Macklife has clearly transformed their factory operations with the Eton system. Moreover, they have leveraged these newfound capabilities to significantly improve their ability to respond to retail demand and compete in the fast-changing fashion market.
“We are very pleased with the way this system has helped us improve our business”, concludes Nabhan. “In addition to getting us up and running on the system very quickly, they have helped us by sharing their deep knowledge of the apparel industry. The investment has quickly paid for itself and we are thinking about adding 30 more stations. Thanks to Eton Systems, we can produce more pieces in less time with the same team. Not only are our teams more productive, they are much happier working on the Eton system. Knowing that we have highly productive and responsive manufacturing capabilities gives us the confidence to focus on increasing sales in all of our retail stores. ”