Bonds seeks to reverse China crisis

Bonds Group is set to take China on at its own game.

The manufacturing arm of the Pacific Brands-owned business, based in Sydney, has revealed plans for an aggressive new business strategy aimed at bringing overseas production back to Australian shores.

In the past 12 months the lingerie and casualwear label has more than tripled its research and development manpower, made "significant" investment in increasing its dye laboratory capacity and small batch dye machines and introduced an array of new fabric options.

The brand, famous for its "Chesty" range, is also investigating the feasibility of bringing the manufacturing of some product, such as elastics, back to its Wentworthville plant.

Just this past week it sent a small delegation to China to look at ways of improving its supply chain management. While last week the brand held a local manufacturing expo aimed at increasing trade and showing off its facilities to would-be clients and staff from other areas of the Pacific Brands stable.

Bonds head of manufacturing and supply chain Richard Abela said while the brand could not compete directly with China in areas such as labour rates and production costs, it had several other areas of efficiency.

These included the ability to handle small batch quantites, increased colour ranges, an increased speed to market and a reduction in supply risk, Abela said.

"As the pressure builds on China, manufacturers there are now minimising stock order numbers and limiting colour choice. We can handle reduced order sizes as small as 20kgs and have the technology to generate up to 100 colours each month. We've also got the ability to go from yarn to finished item on the shop floor within four weeks, which is obviously a greater speed to market than sourcing from China which is tyAt present, Bonds' manufactures more than 85,000 garments across its Australian sites each day. However if Bonds has it way, this could be just the start.

"We haven't set ourselves a target but in the past we have been able to manufacture up to 90,000 garments a day. There's no reason why there couldn't be significantly more than that but how much more I don't know," Abela said.