Apparel March 2020 Apparel March 2020 issue | Page 89

FYI
TECHNOSPORT
TechnoSport is a domestic high performance
athleisure brand. They offer good comfort and
performance to Indian consumers at the bottom
and middle of the pyramid. Its vision is to make
performance and functional apparel affordable for
the masses. Techno Sport has got great traction
among the youth and has disrupted the bottom
where branded fakes in atleisure segment were
commonplace. In their endeavour to achieve this
vision they have become the largest vertically
integrated activewear factory in the country. Their
production capacity is at 150 tons of fabric per
month. It roughly translates to around 650,000
Active RMG per month. They also achieve high
performance by seed funding and accelerating
technical research in functional fabric technology.
Eco-friendly lean manufacturing techniques,
helps them reduce cost and also lowers the
impact on the environment. The company was
started by Sunil Kumar, after he quit his job at
a leading global MNC software company. This
start-up was built by a couple of friends and a
very small capital. They started importing fabrics
from Taiwan and began the production process
in Tirupur city. But slowly to improve performance
and to reduce cost they began manufacturing
the fabrics inhouse. This vertically integrated their
manufacturing systems.
A majority of TechnoSport’s high performance
yarns, processing chemicals, dyes, accessories
etc are sourced from leading MNCs that have
their manufacturing stations in China. But due
to the impact of Coronavirus, TechnoSport,
which had just begun to settle down is now
facing raw material supply disruptions. This in
turn has hampered their productivity. Since their
yarn is stuck in factories unable to find trucks
to transport to port, their dyes, and zipper
shipments too are unable to find slots in flight
cargo as airfares have shot up drastically.
While the Chinese may have done a
commendable job in controlling the virus,
factories are still unable to function due to
tough regulatory measures by the government.
Meanwhile demand pressure has catapulted.
“Manufacturing is not picking pace in spite of
our best efforts. We cannot get any job works or
sourcing as the product that we do is extremely
technical and our price is challenging. So in this
scenario we are requesting our customers to bear
with our supply shortages,” said Kumar.
APPAREL
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March 2020
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87