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Interfab Shirt Mfg. Ltd. is a plant manufacturing shirts as a member of the Viyellatex Group, a well known textile and apparel company in Bangladesh. Interfab was established in 2003 to manufacture shirts for export as a joint venture business with the Fielding Group of the UK. In only the five years since the founding of the business, the production volume has already reached 500,000 pieces per month. It has grown to be one of the leading plants in the country. Originally, the Viyellatex Group was founded as Viyellatex (Garments) Ltd. in 1996, and the first business for the company was to manufacture knit products for export. Since then, the following group of companies were established.
Interfab manufactures uniforms, casual wear and dress shirts. Uniforms compose, 50%, men’s shirts, 40% and women’ s blouses, 10% of the total production. They are 100% exported. “As we have targeted exportation from the beginning, we have striven to meet global standards such as high quality and short turn-around-time instead of merely relying on cheap labor cost and material. We believe these efforts have been recognized by our customers.” Said Mr. Ahasan Kabir khan, Managing Director of the company. Customer orders have continued to grow, and the company is now manufacturing for world class brands, including Benetton, Tesco, Gstar, Raw, Marks & Spencer, s.Oliver, Esprit, Puma, PVH, Arrow, Van Housen and Geoffrey Been. Knit material is produced in-house. The company proposes their own designs for 70% of the production. While there are several unique points about the company, one of them is the fact that the company is producing their knit material in-house. Their material products include cloth products and knit material. As for the knit material, they have a spinning plant, knitting plant and dyeing plant in the group, and they are spinning, weaving and dyeing in-house using cotton purchased from Uzbekistan, the USA, Indonesia, China and Thailand to make circular knitting and flat knitting products. In other words, they are in a position to propose their own ideas from the material stage, which is proving to be a great advantage for the company. This approach applies not only to knit shirts, but also to cloth products. For this purpose, the company is training designers, and today they have two designers for shirts and four designers for knit products. The company intends to further strengthen the design department, and is hiring and training graduates who studied design from the national Fashion Institute, private universities and technical colleges. As a result of such effort, 70% of the products of the company today are based on their own designs, and simple sewing work based on customer designs has decreased down to 30%. The company’s design department is using the same CAD system as the customer’s design department, and in the cutting field, they have introduced automatic spreading machines and Gerber laser cutting machines. Furthermore, their study of sewing technology is progressing, with US-made washing machines being introduced in their own test laboratory for wash testing. Because of these efforts, the company’s technical capability is highly regarded, and requests for wrinkle free shirts, which do not require ironing and which require a high technical level, are increasing. As shown in the photo, hangers are used in the finishing process. This is evidence that high quality is realized in the manufacturing processes. CSR: Contributions to the regional society including support to primary schools. The company is aggressive in employing and training the handicapped. Another unique facet of the company is that they are aggressive in regional contribution activities in addition to their business activities. Because the company originally grew as an export industry, it can be said that satisfying CSR and other conditions has been part of their plan from the beginning in order to export their products to the US and European countries. Or, perhaps it is the other way around. They may be making their utmost effort in their business operation in order to be able to contribute to the local community. Of course, as a company, they are not only creating jobs for more than 10,000 people, but also introducing various social contribution programs. Some examples are:
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