Group seeks to help 'emerging' companies

BUSINESS WRITER

A challenge facing many state entrepreneurs with sewn goods to sell is the ability to find local companies to manufacture their products.

Haidee Stith, executive director of the South Carolina Women's Business Center (SCWBC), said many existing manufacturing companies are unable to do contract manufacturing for "emerging companies in a cost-effective way."

So the WBC is looking for a site and public/private partnerships to open an "apparel/sewn good incubator" that could provide contract sewing work for emerging and existing businesses.

The incubator would fill a gap in production capabilities between a company that may want several dozen items and one that may need hundreds of dozens.

Sara Betts, a research associate and pattern-maker at Clemson Apparel Research (CAR), said many apparel manufacturing companies have their manufacturing line set up to handle certain types of apparel or whatever their specialty is in manufacturing.

When you have a person who only wants 10 or 15 pieces in a given color or size, "It's very disruptive to an already established manufacturer to make changes on their sewing floor, in their processes, and their operation to handle a very small volume and then change back equipment and order of operation for whatever their previous product was," she said.

"It becomes costly for them as well as for the small requestor to have their goods made."

Chris Cole, director of CAR, a SCWBC partner, said the apparel incubator would not compete with commercial companies.

"It offers one more level of assurance that once we have one of these entrepreneurial companies that's grown to a certain size, it has a certain level of stability, now it's big enough and stable enough to be able to graduate where it goes to a true commercial company for operations," she said.

The SCWBC is a program of the South Carolina Manufacturing Extension Partnership and is funded through the U.S. Small Business Administration. Its mission is to help women start and grow businesses, but its work is also extended to men.

The SCWBC began its plan for an incubator after seeing an increase in women starting apparel and sewn goods companies. The range of wares made available by the entrepreneurs includes pocketbooks, clothes, medical pillows, and other items.

Most of the companies are making niche products, Stith said. "But if they can't find a cost effective way to manufacture it, even if they have demands, they're not going to make a lot of money. What we see overall with a lot of women business owners is that they are not as profitable as they could be."

CAR helps the entrepreneurs from SCWBC in the design of their product, prototyping and very limited production, Cole said. Then, she said, there's the next stage as the companies grow where they need much larger scale volumes, but not the level of volumes that most commercial manufacturers need to be economically feasible, she said.

"The apparel incubator is envisioned as filling in that hole in the growth process for the companies," she said.

As far as the workforce for the incubators, Stith said there are people with strong sewing skills and an interest in doing that kind of work. There are also facilities that used to do that kind of work have closed all over the state, she said.

"One of our thoughts is if this concept did work effectively, once we got one facility going, we could have facilities in other counties around the state."

The SCWBC had focused on Saluda for the initial incubator.

At that time, Quality Stitching, the last cut and sew facility in Saluda County was closing, hundreds had lost their jobs, and the only industry there was a poultry processing plant.

"We felt that it was really critical to try to find some manufacturing capacity back into the county," Stith said.

Efforts for the Saluda incubator didn't work out due to an inability to find funding and a facility.

"But we're not giving up," Stith said.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Call the South Carolina Women's Business Center at 803-461-8900 or visit www.scwbc.org.