Want to move towards womenswear beginning with fabrics
Ilteks Tekstil started its textile life in 1971 and specialised in lady's fabric. In 1978 it switched its production to menswear and since then the production has continued under the supervision of its present chairman Ilya Kohen. Fibre2Fashion spoke to Eli Kohen, Marketing Manager, Ilteks Tekstil, to gather information about Turkey’s knitwear sector, its competitiveness as a region with rest of the world, and future plans of the company.
Where do you source your raw materials from?
Egypt, Turkey, Italy, India.
What is the market size of knitwear in Turkey? How has the sector evolved in the last 10 years?
Within the last decade, market size of knitwear grew incrementally in Turkey due to a couple of subjects. The development of communication and IT systems enabled companies to make better exports or find more resources for imports. As economies grew, people became more demanding of fashion and especially knitwear products. Compared to manufacturing giants located in Middle East Asia, Turkey evolved more towards niche and luxury segments which require more craftmanship.
How competitive is the knitwear sector in Turkey from rest of the world? What are its strengths?
Turkey’s knitwear sector is highly competitive especially in domestic market. Since the industry usually operates in euros or dollars, customers are very price sensitive, and it is crucial to build strong business relationships. In some cases, no matter how good your quality is, relationships can be more significant to win an order. In my experience, I have seen many people trying to win our customers by calling them daily or emailing them, but our human values led to where we are today.
Turkey is also a significant competitor for other major textile countries such as Bangladesh, India, and China. The strength that Turkish market has are similar law system like European countries, time efficiency in means of transportation and location, competency with flexible minimums and niche orders.
The competition in knitwear in Turkey is more on quality rather than quantity. The craftsmanship and fabric quality you provide shows what you are capable of. Yet, both skills in some cases may not be enough. The most crucial differentiator is you communication and organisation skills if you want to be the manufacturer for big brands. Organising an export requires a remarkable plan including international testing systems, box separating for each country and many others. In Ilteks, we are empowered by our family attributes which enables us to work in harmony.
Which are your major export markets?
Italy, Germany, UK.
How big is your team of designers? How many clients do they handle?
We have 2 pattern designers and 6 customer representatives with different functions. We work as a team. ‘Each individual’s responsibility is weighted on different tasks varying from accessories to fabric production to garment finishing. Each of them handles 10 clients on an average.
Going ahead, what would be the major boosters for the knitwear sector of Turkey?
To understand about the major boosters for the knitwear sector for Turkey, we must look at several subjects. First of all, the changing consumer profile in apparel industry. People are moving more towards wearing smart casual, activewear or even ‘streetstyle’ at both leisure and work hours as workplaces are becoming more flexible on clothing. These are all knitwear products and increasing demand for these products pressurises brands to be more innovative and authentic which boosts knitwear sector in Turkey as it can provide all these components.
Besides, changing exchange rates, increasing euro-dollar value against Turkish lira results in acquiring decent quality and cheaper craftsmanship which is intriguing for many fashion labels.
Turkey is also a country open to regulations which makes textiles in Turkey more reliable. This is crucial for brands who want to develop sustainable initiatives. Turkey prioritises sustainable initiatives and has launched many new government support initiatives.
How was Ilteks formed? How has the company progressed through the years? What were the initial hurdles faced and how did you tide over them?
Our founder Ilya Niso Kohen started this company from scratch by beginning to sell fabrics in Eminonu in 1970. His conscious way of treating people, good-faith and understanding of luxury fashion formed Ilteks’s core values and groundwork. Ilteks made its breakthrough by first exporting to South Africa in mid 90’s--a business relationship and friendship that is still ongoing. International and domestic financial crises of the past decades affected many including Ilteks but our ‘always keep inventory full’ business model led us to survive all hurdles.
300 designs and at least 8 combos per design. How much of research work goes behind creating these many designs?
We constantly keep in touch with many professionals in the industry from yarn producers to fashion designers. We are in the necessary platforms to follow new trends in fashion. As I mentioned, our business has this crucial core value of good-faith which depends on our collaboration skills in business. We team up with fashion labels to develop new patterns and fabric designs to create satisfactory outcomes. Last but not the least, Ilteks built its organisational culture on family attributes. Every employee holds on to their job as his/her company. So, we work with passion daily. We try to see through eyes of luxury brands designers by looking at the architecture, cuisine and other daily life textures to apply in our fabrics. We make cross-functional teams of designers and textile engineers to put those fabric patterns into different techniques of fabrics.
What kind of innovations would you like to bring into your business going forward?
We would like to acquire more eco-friendly certificates and produce more eco-friendly fabrics. We want to improve our IT systems to execute exports and imports more smoothly. Also, to be more efficient in collection decision process we want to digitalise our company by beginning 3D fashion.
What percentage of your business is menswear and what percentage is womenswear? Is kidswear on the cards anytime soon?
We are a 100 per cent menswear manufacturing company. Last year we started to produce kidswear for one brand. We want to move towards womenswear beginning with fabrics.
What disruptions has the pandemic brought into your business?
Many disruptions happened both financially and socially. As the demand for apparel products decreased immensely, the prices of raw materials increased. We struggled to find high-quality cotton, linen and other materials and faced decreased or highly increased price sensitive customer orders. Ilteks’s ‘always keep inventory full’ business model led to survive all pandemic led disruptions. At the same time, many people got sick and quarantined at their homes.
Modern garments versus knitwear -- which side are consumer sentiments tilted at and why?
Modern garments are made with style and simplicity and smart casual/streetstyle trends are complementing knitwear. Printed garments and seamless machines are becoming a trend. It is also palpable that there is huge rising consumer segment in Asia that loves buying luxury online. This is the reason we are seeing more job alerts around visual merchandising and special fashion brand filters on social media tools such as Snapchat and Instagram.
What do you see as some of the main problems regarding sustainable fashion facing the industry now and where does knitwear fall into the scheme of things?
Sustainability in business means planning and implementing business operations without jeopardising the future generation’s livelihood. People must understand that sustainable fashion is a combination of concepts. It includes social rights, timelessness, and eco-friendliness. Worker rights and regulations must be executed to be transparent and ‘fair’. Likewise, the raw materials should be regulated and shouldn’t be seen as natural ingredients. Materials such as viscose is a result of many destroyed forests and fabric finishing processes involving high chemical substance usage.
So, there would be 4 main problems regarding sustainable fashion which are--regulation, feasibility, greenwashing and limitations of design. Greenwashing occurs when brands show off as if they are implementing those concepts in their business models when actually they are not which creates a huge confusion in the consumer’s mind. From my experience, under-regulation is a significant problem because many companies can show within their supply chains that they are organic or eco-friendly without any regulation or inspection whatsoever. On the consumer side, minimalistic designs can be unsatisfactory to consumers and decrease interest for sustainable garments.
What are your future plans as a company?
First of all, we want to expand our R&D department by building our own collection room. We would like to be garment design consultants as in fabrics. At the same time, we are prioritising sustainability in our business by becoming a part of a more transparent supply chain and recruiting a sustainability manager for raw material research and business operations. We are aware that sustainability initiatives will be costly. So we adapt by becoming more flexible in lead times and minimums of production. We will try to provide niche and high-end products. We would also like to begin collecting orders for womenswear fabrics.
Credits: Paulami Chatterjee & Shilpi Panjabi
Published on: 01/10/2021
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
