As an increasing number of new brands are coming into the market, they are opening up new business opportunities for mills. This was good news for exhibitors at Premiere Vision New York (January 16-17, 2018), who told Inside Fashion that these news brands were becoming an important source of new orders.

“There are a lot of new, independent brands coming into the market.  Independent designers are always looking for something different so this is a big chance for us. We’re very good at product development,” said Charles Tsai at Full Blossom (Taiwan), explaining that his company was a vertical operation from yarn through to the finishing and could create very unique products.

“E-commerce has increased the competition at retail by enabling many new brands to enter the market. At the same time, it’s caused some traditional brands to lose a lot of business, or even shut down,” said Hans Hsu at Ruentex (Taiwan).  “Amazon is growing its private label apparel business and will compete with traditional apparel brands on price,” he added.

While there’s been a surge in new, independent brands entering the market, most of them are quite small. For mills that require larger orders, the market is still very tough.

“The US is a little challenging for us since we need big quantities to do custom designs for our buyers.  Unfortunately, in the US the big volume orders usually go to China.   We provide good delivery and good quality so we are trying to take some orders away from China,” said Yasemin Selcuk at Confetti Fabrics (Turkey).

Mills Sees Good Times Ahead in the U.S.