Moose clothing brand to venture into the region
Brandix Apparel’s Moose clothing brand, now concentrating predominantly in the Sri Lankan market, is looking at expanding in the region.
Brandix Group Managing Director Hasitha Premaratne told The Sunday Times Business that with a fair share of the local market, the company aims to continue that dominance in Sri Lanka and also to expand beyond. “We have a fair share of the local market, and the idea is to continue the dominance in Sri Lanka and also to expand beyond and look at what are the other global markets that might be interesting to explore,” he said, noting that the company will be looking at expanding into regional markets.
When queried on the lack of new brands emerging from Sri Lanka, he said that the retail industry and brands are completely different from each other and not an extension of manufacturing highlighting, the importance of needing to understand the skills that are needed, investments that are needed and the mindset that is needed to develop a brand. “Just because you have a T-shirt doesn’t mean that you can brand and retail it because it’s a different business.” Acknowledging that there exists a potential to enhance value by pursuing forward integration into branding and retail, a strategy that several corporations have successfully implemented, he noted that it will require time for Sri Lanka to develop the necessary skill sets and progress in this direction.
Sri Lanka has re-established design development capabilities, allowing larger organisations to create, design and develop products for their brands. This forward integration represents a significant forward integration, and the country is confident that additional opportunities will arise for exploration beyond their current scope, Mr. Premaratne added.
The global apparel industry saw an extremely fast recovery post-COVID pandemic and in 2020 it went into kind of a clear drop in the market. In 2021 and 2022 saw a very sharp recovery in the Western market, particularly in the US and there were a lot of subsidies that were offered to consumers.
“So, they were at home and mostly spent that money buying clothing.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surge in demand for clothing, leading to supply chain difficulties. This situation continued until September 2022, when markets opened up and consumers started spending more on travel. This led to a shortage of clothing, and brands began buying and building inventory in the US and Europe. This caused sudden demand drops from Western markets, leading to excessive entry and pauses in purchases. The global supply chain experienced a sharp decline for 12 months. By September 2023, a gradual recovery began, with factories full. However, inventory correction has been completed, and Western markets show some volatility due to the lack of significant growth.
“While the volumes have come back, which is the good news, the competition intensified and as a result, there was a significant price war between Bangladesh – Vietnam, India, and Sri Lanka – everybody was looking for orders – so whatever the price that they could get the order, they were taking them and obviously prices started to come down quite sharply and those price drops will not get back to where it was now. That’s a big challenge for us at the moment,” Mr. Premaratne added.
This year the incident in Bangladesh did have a few days of disruption, but the industry recovered much faster than expected. “People started to come back to work in the factories. We started with a short lapse and had about 6-7 days of disruption for that whole period and thereafter the absenteeism was incredibly low, and people started to come back.”
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