"Made in China": why and how we work with China. - Animoz Clothing

“Made in China“ : pourquoi et comment nous travaillons avec la Chine.

We regularly highlight the efforts we make to offer you ethical and environmentally friendly products, while continuing to support animal protection. We are transparent about our Chinese manufacturing, and many of you find it contrary to our values. Aware of the bad image of "Made in China", we have chosen to explain what it really is and under what conditions we have decided to work with this country.

Our journey towards ethical fashion began in April 2019 with the desire to improve our practices in an industry that we knew was polluting and socially criticized. After a study of the market for eco-responsible materials, hemp quickly became an obvious choice. It is an ecologically and technically revolutionary material, but it is still too little used, wrongly so. This "rarity" of hemp, compared to organic cotton for example, makes it a particularly expensive material, especially when the quantities purchased are small.

We quickly realized that turning to French hemp was impossible, because it was too expensive to follow our business model and continue to offer you affordable prices. Indeed, in addition to our website, we sell our products through our network of specialized resellers. These are additional intermediaries that we have to pay and take into account when we set our prices. The sale of proximity being important to us, we refused to sacrifice it to the profit of a sale by Internet only. So we had to find another solution to minimize our production costs: buying our hemp in China.

Why China? It is simply the world leader and a specialist in this material with more than half of the 600 international patents in hemp fiber production.

Once the raw material was sourced in China, it seemed more logical to find manufacturing partners nearby. And we can now count on trusted partners on site to help us control the quality of our fabrics and garments. Concentrating the actors of our value chain in the same territory also allows us to save on transportation and reduce our lead times.

Moreover, a Chinese confection allows us of course to reduce our production costs, compared to a French or European confection, we will not hide it from you. This is what allows us to offer ethical products, especially in hemp, at affordable prices. Our margins being already reduced by the increase in the cost of our raw materials, we could not drastically increase our production costs without the final price being also strongly impacted. We could have theoretically proposed a hemp tee-shirt "Made in France" but its price would have been around 80 euros, we would have been far from a product accessible to most people...

However, and it is on this point that general opinion is often misinformed, producing in China is not a miracle cure to reduce costs. Even if "Made in China" remains cheaper than most European productions, the situation has changed enormously over the last decades and to reach very low prices it is now necessary to turn to other Asian countries: Bangladesh or Pakistan for example, where working conditions are largely more difficult to control.

Moreover, China suffers from a bad image and the general opinion seems to have stopped at an observation now far from the current reality. Indeed, the country is no longer what it was years ago and huge improvements have been made. The era of Mao Zedong when quantity took precedence over quality to meet the economic emergency of the country (feeding its population) is over and China is now the second world power, with an economy and modern production tools, allowing to bet on quality.

But because we are aware that drifts can exist, as everywhere, we have chosen to rely on tools that allow us to control the practices within our partner factories: certifications. Indeed, our main fabric supplier produces according to the GOTS certification, which guarantees the respect of ecological and social principles. In addition, our garment factory is SA8000 certified, as described in our previous articles. We were interested in the improvements brought by the certification in our factory, even though it already had this guarantee at the beginning of our cooperation. Specifically, the social coverage of the workers is now 100% of the workforce, compared to 20% before the certification process. In addition, working hours are controlled with a base of 40 hours per week and overtime paid at 150%, and at 200% when it is a Saturday. The factory with which we work is particularly attentive to the remuneration of the employees who receive a salary 75% higher than the legal minimum, for the lowest salaries. Finally, our partner has moved to a new, more modern factory in January 2020.

Always in a logic of continuous improvement, we do not turn our back on "Made in Europe" and hope one day to produce in sufficient quantities to bring our production center closer. As far as "Made in France" is concerned, we would like to remind you that it is advisable to remain vigilant, and this model also shows its limits: products stamped "Made in France" are not necessarily made in the way you expect and "Made in France" does not systematically rhyme with eco-responsible materials. For example, when the brand was created, our products were screen printed and finished locally (in Clermont Ferrand and Thiers), even if they were not assembled in France. As foreseen by the customs services, "the product takes the origin of the country where it underwent the last substantial transformation", we could then have used the label "Made in France", but we were opposed to it, that constituting according to us, a misleading advertising.

We hope that this article, in all transparency, has pleased you and that it will allow you to better understand the issues we face. Our efforts continue and it is thanks to you that the adventure continues.

For more information on "Made in China":