Though there were many challenges in the year 2022, however, the textile and apparel industry experienced significant progress in terms of export, investment, product, and market development etc. Leading market analytics McKinsey’s report ‘The State of Fashion 2023’ highlighted that in 2023 leading markets like the USA will observe a 5% to 10% growth, while the European market fashion sale will remain as it is or see around 3% growth due to the conflict in Ukraine.
According to report, the growth in Asia, the Middle East and parts of the Asia Pacific fashion market will log a tremendous boost in 2023.
Since 2022 was the transition time for the textile and apparel industry with the big challenges to comply with the order flow, sustainability, adopting extreme fashion & trends, cost management, etc., we should put our focus on the below areas to have a sustainable business in the long run:
Adapt sustainable technologies: Accommodate and equip the production facilities with sustainable technologies and machinery. Sustainable technologies and machinery can reduce resource consumption, save costs and increase productivity.
Branding ourselves: Besides the brands’ design and techniques, we must create our own innovations, fashions and techniques for branding ourselves in the fashion markets. Already Bangladesh has been doing its own product design, innovations, etc. It has to be increased, and also needs to ensure effective branding.
Safe raw material sourcing: we should have versatile, sustainable and safer raw material sourcing. We should not be dependent on some fixed sources, rather we have to create alternative sourcing points for all the raw materials and the machinery to avoid the monopoly business policies.
Automation: We should adopt process automation and sustainable process development techniques to reduce the workforce and the cost as well.
Process integration: Putting more focus on process integration and increasing productivity to minimize the production overheads and overall costings.
Alternative energy: We need to find out alternative and renewable energy sources as there is a global and domestic crisis for power and fuels. We are observing that the ongoing acute power and energy crisis has created enormous disorder in industrial production.
Vertical setup: We must focus on increasing the vertical setup here to minimize the cost and the production lead time as well.
Policy to stop unethical costing negotiations: Govt. authority should take a policy and set up a benchmark for all the process-wise costing to stop the unethical costing negotiate on for what we are struggling to sustain in the industry with the commitments and the business ethics.
Unique sustainability requirements: We see that different buyers set different types of sustainable requirements. Manufacturers face problems to maintain such different codes of conduct. Instead of working with multiple brands with multiple sustainable requirements, we must ask them to come under one umbrella with the unique Benchmark.
