Fast Company writes about American Apparel's New Image — it went from emphasizing its “ethical” sweatshop-free production to “sexy T-shirts for young people” — but what interested me was its new internal emphasis on efficient operations:
The company’s — and Charney’s — image had gotten so much attention that nobody seemed to bother checking into how its actual business might have changed. So I met with Marty Bailey, the company’s vice president of operations. Quiet, serious, soft-spoken, and fully clothed, Bailey was an industry veteran who had begun his long education in manufacturing efficiency — and the hard realities of globalization — with Fruit of the Loom more than 20 years earlier. He had come to see offshore outsourcing as a mixed proposition. He believed that its promised labor savings had been diluted by the costs of moving materials to the cheap-labor haven and back, and by sacrificed quality. He believed that with the right plan, a U.S. manufacturer could still make money.American Apparel’s factory was, he reckoned, the 41st manufacturing facility he had walked into with the mission of improving efficiency. The company was producing 32,000 pieces a day and struggling to keep up with orders. In months, Bailey’s system was churning out 90,000 pieces a day and would eventually reach 250,000. While the company was projecting an air of almost reckless decadence in its ads, it was quietly building a thriving made-in-America business model.