Sector: Women’s knitwear | Operation: wool-cashmere capsule | How the client reached us: word of mouth
A client reached out to us through word of mouth. He wanted to produce a Made in Italy capsule of women’s knitwear in a wool and cashmere blend. On price he had a firm number: he was already sourcing the same quality out of China at $30 per piece, and he wanted to stay as close to that figure as he could. On quantities he had another constraint: 50 to 80 pieces per style per color, well below the standard minimums of any Italian knitwear manufacturer.
The challenge
The challenge for 2306 was translating Made in Italy into a capsule that had to land near Chinese price points and under the minimums Italian manufacturers require. Put that way, it sounds like an impossible request, and for a good reason: minimums exist to cover the cost of setting up a production run, and selling small volumes would wipe out the manufacturer’s margin.
The 2306 solution
- We worked through our network of Italian knitwear mills looking for one specific opportunity: a manufacturer who, at that moment, had already opened a wool and cashmere run for one of his other clients, somewhere else in the world.
- We found it. The mill was willing to bring our client’s capsule into the same run, on two operating conditions: model tweaks to differentiate the two collections, and custom labels and tags for our client.
- Our client’s production was added to the larger client’s run. The industrial setup was already paid for, the mill’s minimums were covered by the principal order, and our client’s capsule went through as an integration of volume.
The result
- A Made in Italy capsule in a wool and cashmere blend, with a per-piece price close to the $30 our client had been paying in China.
- Minimums of 50 to 80 pieces per style per color, effectively bypassed.
- The same mill, the same technical care, the same quality standard as the large client’s run that was sitting on the same machines.
What this operation revealed
- For a small brand, having the right intuition is only the first step.
- Decade-long relationships with manufacturers carry real weight, because they make it possible to design solutions that fall outside standard practice.
- Choosing the right partner can turn what looked impossible into something workable.
The lesson
For a small brand operating on tight margins, Made in Italy isn’t something you buy off the shelf. It’s a solution you build case by case, by reading the openings the Italian manufacturing network offers at any given moment.
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