Home > Daily Necessities > Is Sri Lankan apparel export industry looking at a brand-rich future

Amanté, LiCC Jeans, Aviraté, Dilly’s, Aqua Island, Emerald, Ekko and so on…, the list of successful Sri Lankan fashion brands built by apparel export companies seems to be growing…

These aforementioned resident exporter brands of Lankan apparel manufacturers took over an entire fashion runway with trend-ready, consumer-friendly, innovative designer collections designed and produced solely by them at the first ever Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sri Lanka held in October last year. This growing importance placed in apparel makers’ resident brands seems to hint a new era where the business evolves from being a traditional B2B maker to a much more dynamic industry working directly with brands and consumers alike.

Exploring this growing trend, the topic of apparel industry-built brands was discussed with two of the nation’s biggest wearable manufacturers with local brands.

Kaushalya Gunaratne, Manager of Business Development at MAS Intimates, revealed a much bigger picture of the company’s evident love for building brands. Gunaratne stated that naturally, the first and the most primary reason to create own brands beyond the export clienteles is to mitigate risk and reach markets directly while also considering the slowdown in the US and the EU markets. Any maker-company, she added, would generally venture into forming their own brands after getting familiar with the product and the market, which is again, a very organic process.

While pointing at MAS’ intimatewear success story Amanté, Gunaratne said, “Amanté has MAS’ decades’ worth expertise in making lingerie which is why it did so well in India where we piloted it. So, we were able to successfully launch it in Sri Lanka and even in Pakistan.”

Further, Gunaratne mentioned the fact that resident brands also bring in important leverage for the company’s credibility, diversification and storytelling for unique material, ingredients and technologies that they pioneer. Her statement seems just if we refer to the case of the unique surface illumination technology that was developed and branded as ‘Firefly’, which helped to present the story and the engineering behind it in an effective way. She says ‘branding’ is not only for retail products but also for tech, material and ingredients, which compile as important parts of MAS’ diverse portfolio.

This leads us to the direction that ‘branding’ is also becoming an integral part of Sri Lankan apparel makers’ diversification towards becoming specialists and pioneers of the technologies and materials created especially for wearables.

Some apparel makers like Hirdaramani hail from a long history of retail which makes nursing brands very much a part of their company’s DNA. LiCC jeans – a brand currently focusing on the Sri Lankan market, is Hirdaramani’s brainchild. Piyumi Perera, Design Consultant and Head of Woven Design at Hirdaramani Apparels, stated that Sri Lankan apparel manufacturers’ move on building own brands is an inevitable one, a matter of time and maturity of both companies and the domestic markets. “Before, we didn’t have mature markets, but it’s getting there now as people are beginning to identify with brands. Companies themselves have become mature where we have evolved from manufacturers to product developers, to now, where we are fully fledged operations complete from designing to marketing a fashion product,” Perera pointed out as she herself heads a growing design department at the company.

Perera further echoed one significant sentiment that seems to be prevalent in the Lankan apparel industry nowadays. She said that when the manufacturing companies have all the expertise, then they too think: ‘why can’t we do it?’; in the sense, why can’t they build their own brand… However, Lankan apparel makers are cautious on not to become competitors to their own clients from the US and the EU, which still brings in the majority of business for them. “Yes, we are and will always be very sensitive to our clients’ brands, their signature aesthetics and main markets, which is why you don’t see many local apparel industry brands venturing beyond South Asia,” Perera maintained.

Michael Mascarenhas, the Senior Designer behind the Timex Garments’ Aviraté – one of the first industry pioneered brands – feels that apparel industry-owned brands play an important role in the domestic fashion market by creating wearables designed and homegrown with creative talent. “Domestic markets now have an easy access to international products so their benchmark is naturally higher, and I think we can cater to that! Sri Lankan fashion labels are highly valued by our consumers and it’s important to deliver on that sentiment,” he added.

Further, while discussing what it means to be a part of Timex, Mascarenhas mentioned that being the resident brand of one of Sri Lanka’s best dressmakers has its perks; “It is a massive advantage because it is the oldest proper dressmaker here. Whether it is to laser cut, embellish, pleat or add any kind of surface ornamentation from printing to embroidery, it’s all possible for Aviraté because of Timex. Basically, if we can dream it, Timex can make it.” This highlights the key advantages that apparel industry-bred brands have over others, and also on their influence in elevating product-quality standards in the local market.

As western markets become more unstable and economies begin to slow down across the US and Europe, the opposite seems to be the case in Asia, particularly South and East Asia where populations and middle classes are booming. Investing in building brands now, while the markets are still growing, will pay off later and business-savvy Lankan apparel makers know this. Simultaneously, the B2C is becoming more accessible over the World Wide Web which indicates that these new brands no longer have to depend on expensive brick-and-mortar operations to reach their consumers directly. The timing seems to be just right for the Sri Lankan apparel export industry to go for a ‘brand-rich’ future.

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