Materials are generally sourced from the four major garment supplying communities which are India, the Far East, Turkey and Eastern Europe. There are a number of factors which are for this choice, they have more fabrics to offer and in larger quantities at a lower price, although there are some drawbacks of sourcing from these places such as language barriers, time constraints and ethical issues which we will get onto later.
Because of sourcing from these places wether you produce your products there or transport it back to produce you will have to decide on the best way to transport your goods. There are three ways, firstly air, this is high speed and can be done on a global scale, however there are weight restrictions also the cost of air transportation is very expensive. The next is by Land this could be either train or truck, this was is cheaper and can provide have many deliveries daily. The problem with this is if deliveries need to be made over seas another use of transportation is needed, so your limited to where it can be delivered. The final method is by sea, this method is most commonly used, it allows for heavier items to be transported and lots of them. It's a relatively cheap method and can move products all over the world. This method still has problems as it is the slowest of them and bad weather can also affect this time.
There are different suppliers in the industry, a direct supplier who has all the control of the processes, they will arrange transport, they will send information to the supplier. The next is an agent this will be a sales and design team that acts as a go between factories and retailers. Finally there's the full service vendor, normally used for large scale manufacturing, they take care of all the processes from design to providing export documents.
In the supply chain ethical issues often come up, it is a problem normally in the production process. Most garment production is done abroad, where it is much cheaper, however this sometimes means that the welfare of workers is not at a suitable level. Workers are often forced to work in small crowded spaces for long hours, this is all to keep up the consumers demand for cheap clothes.
055