After the Bell: Shopping sucks, but SA is stitching a comeback

While I was growing up, I don’t think I hated anything quite as much as going to shop for clothes. Even now, when I’m faced with the prospect of going into a store and buying something clothing-related, I’ll find plenty of reasons to put it off.

I was reminded of this when a friend told me today how she’d spent her weekend being reduced to tears by the exhausting and eventually unhappy search for a long-sleeved T-shirt for her son.

In the interests of saving you the same experience, she says if you share her quest, you and Indiana Jones can avoid Woolies, Mr Price and Edgars.

And strangely, buying clothes has never been more complicated.

There are more choices now than ever before. Literally, there are so many different things to wear, and different places to buy them.

So I find it interesting that many people, including myself, actually prefer to stay with what we know.

For men, there is a very simple uniform in the corporate world, and you can really only choose between a suit without a tie, chinos or really smart jeans and a good shirt.

Women, of course, have much more complex decisions to make. So bewildering are the signals that are sent to women about what is appropriate to wear that my brain would melt down very quickly if faced with the prospect.

But clothing is integral to our daily lives and sometimes, more fundamentally, about how we see ourselves.

If it is that you “are what you wear”, then we represent the world. 

Well, really quite a small portion of it. 

Mainly, China, Bangladesh and perhaps India.

But more and more we are also representing KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

Read more: After the Bell: Capitec’s Gerrie Fourie and the power of family in producing extraordinary people

About three years ago, our clothing industry started to panic a little bit. It was entirely justified. The two Chinese behemoths, Shein and Temu were making massive inroads into our market.

Their secret was pretty simple, but their real strength was in execution.

They were able to design clothes quickly and get them out into the market at very low cost.

The idea was that you would wear something for just a couple of times and then chuck it away.

For someone like me, who thinks having two work jerseys is too much, this is horrific.

Think of the environmental impact, the sheer waste of it.

But to the people who buy these clothes, it makes perfect sense. The delivery system works, the designs are up to the minute, and they’re wonderfully cheap.

However, I think something has shifted fundamentally in our market.

Because our own stores are pushing back, and have pushed back very successfully.

Read more: South African start-up Faro is using AI to turn fashion’s waste into affordable luxury

First it was The Foschini Group, which realised that if you control stock properly, you can actually make quite a lot of money by producing your stock here. 

In a competitive industry like this, it was always clear they would be followed by other people very quickly.

And that other powerhouse of our local textile industry, Mr Price, has followed suit.

They’ve increased their local procurement by more than 50% in the past five years. 

You can imagine all the positive knock-on effects to this.

They’re creating jobs and all of the ecosystems that exist around clothing factories.

This would include people as diverse as drivers and designers. 

It is a wonderful virtuous circle in our economy.

So, what happened to create this happier state of affairs?

Clearly our business leaders spotted an opportunity. They realised that, actually, while Shein and Temu were going to be threats, there were ways to counter them.

One thing about clothes is that because everybody buys them, value for money does matter.

And yes, Shein and Temu will give you what you want for a much lower price, but the value-for-money proposition is not the same.

There is no chance that I could survive the winter wearing just one Shein or Temu jersey to work everyday. It would simply fall apart.

And the same must hold for much of what they sell. 

Basically, while Shein and Temu were a shock at first, once consumers realised they did not last for long, they looked elsewhere.

The other issue is price. And in this market, price really matters.

When they started, these companies took advantage of the wonderfully named “de minimis” rules. If shipments were below a certain value, customs did not charge any fees.

The textile industry (including the clothing union Sactwu) spoke to the government and got the law changed.

While there was some grumbling for a while from frustrated customers (would you like to suddenly pay more for a product you’ve been using for a while?), some must have changed their behaviour by now. 

All in all, this seems to have worked. 

Customers are shopping with their feet, more South Africans are employed and our economy is getting a boost.

Now, if someone could just source long-sleeved T-shirts for boys we could call our clothing industry a complete success… DM