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To: TobagoJack who wrote (66723)	7/30/2005 11:41:44 AM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

TobagoJack Re: "Slagle not withstanding" I really did enjoy your most recent Blog/Travelogue and would have loved to have been tagging along with you just to see all those factory floors. I just LOVE that stuff. My observations are probably not worth much, me being so far removed from the action over there, but anyway I have a few, and some questions. You mention these guys (the locals, not the transnationals) who have going but profitless operations in apparel (shirts) and who are plunging into all sorts of other ventures. That seems odd to me. Now apparel, especially done on some commission basis, is about the most simple business I know of. If you can cook or run a lemonade stand you should be able to run a commission apparel outfit. Now if you are vertical and do your own styling (sending your designers and colorists off to New York and Paris to stay up with the latest fads) then it gets more complicated. But if you have an owner/management team deeply involved in running a large commission cut and sew operation, especially a profitless one, where do they get the talents (and resources) to jump into something else far removed, say auto parts (unless the auto parts compemplated are not some other textile product like headliners or car carpeting)? I'm not trying to figure out what exactly your customers are doing, I'm just making an observation. I'm not saying that it would be impossible for some apparel operator to branch out far afield but the failure rate of such an approach is likely to be high. The transnationals bring their own proprietary skill set with them. Now I'm not saying that you cannot reverse engineer things, indeed that is something I have doen all my career (including wearing some disguise to sneak into a competitors operation <g>). But it takes time, and more than just money. You seem to be describing a manufacturing environment of great fluidity where an operator in one field despite the "profitless" nature of the business would have the resources to just "plunge" into some new and presumably more complicated and capital intensive business. Unless he can just "walk away" from whatever debt he incurred with his apparel business and find new funding where does he find the capital? Also, most every type of manufacturing operation more difficult than apparel requires lots of closely guarded "proprietary" tricks of the trade that can be worked out over time but have a very expenisve and time consuming learning curve. Apparel is about the only factory operation I can think of that requires no proprietary secrets. What am I missing here? Slagle