This speech was delivered at Bayer Crop Science's Fibermax 2006, Singapore on June 27, 2006 by Jeffrey Silberman, Executive Director of the IFCP, and Chairperson of the Textile Development and Marketing Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
By way of introduction, I am the Executive Director of the International Forum for Cotton Promotion. The IFCP's objective is to encourage and facilitate domestically funded and domestically focused cotton promotion programs with companies and organizations like yours; companies that together make up the entire textile supply chain. Our membership consists of 17 cotton promotion organizations from 13 countries, and our sponsorship program includes many who support that effort.
The IFCP is a forum where cotton promotion ideas are exchanged and evaluated. We try to expose you to promotion techniques, some new, some that have been tried before, and we provide a simple "how to" approach to encourage you to try some of those ideas. We catalogue promotion techniques at our website that are cost effective, easy to implement, and we particularly look for ideas can be replicated around the world.
In short, we want to help you sell more cotton products by providing you with mechanisms that highlight the benefits of cotton, and information that documents the consumers' favorable acceptance of cotton's smoothness, softness, comfort, absorbency, and more.
And we hope you will sell more cotton at the expense of chemical fibers. I think it's safe to say that most of us in this room want that, but of course, the questions become "how can we realistically go about doing this, and how do you measure the results?" I would like to talk with you today about one technique that you might try.
To begin with, imagine this scenario. You have the opportunity to meet with about 50 potential customers from all over the world every year, introduce yourself to them, get to know the way they think, listen to their concerns, and even influence the way they will do business. You have the ability to do that rather simply, and you have the ability to plant the seeds of a mutually productive relationship that can benefit you for years to come.
In order for me to explain how you can do this, I have to tell you about my other occupation. I am also the Chairperson of the Textile Development and Marketing Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, and in this capacity, I meet, teach, and get to know many of your potential customers every year. Our Department teaches about 3,200 students different levels of textile marketing and technology over the course of a year, and most of those graduates will enter the fashion and textile-related industries. They might work for you or your competitors, but there is also a strong likelihood that they will be your customers. Some will stay in the U.S., but a large portion will return home. A significant number of FIT's 11,000 students are from countries around the world.
About 150-200 of these students each year, small percentages by comparison, focus on becoming fabric development specialists in consuming countries. This is different from the role of producing countries, where the focus is on developing optimum manufacturing and production efficiencies. In consuming countries, students use their technical and structural design expertise, in concert with their understanding of textile marketing strategy, to develop commercially viable products for retail.
Our students spend four years learning about the textile supply chain and learn how to use that knowledge as a tool kit to help conduct business in this field. In their senior year, they work on projects together with companies and organizations willing to devote time and expertise. They develop collections of products, with the aim of commercializing them.
I'm here to present to you an example of one such project which demonstrates how to combine two related worlds — textile and fashion universities, and industry — to build project partnerships that can help you develop new business for your company.
I hope to demonstrate 3 likely outcomes from collaborations between your company, and textile schools:
The first intended outcome is to show you how a project with the right college can enable you to reach downstream, and participate in developing products closer to the retail level. This will enable you to have more influence in your product's future closer to the point of sale. The more involvement and control you maintain in the supply chain of your product, the more likely you are to succeed.
The second intended outcome is to highlight how working with schools and focusing on cotton based products enables you to demonstrate how to maximize the "cotton story" that can create benefits for everyone in the cotton supply chain.
The third outcome will hopefully be to show you that these projects are easy to embark on, the financial investment is minimal, and what is really needed is your expertise and willingness. In many cases you are beginning your relationships with your future customers early, giving you a competitive advantage for the long term.
The promotion strategy that I am presenting to you today came out of a meeting in May 2004, when the IFCP conducted a Cotton Promotion Workshop in Cary, North Carolina at the Cotton Incorporated World Headquarters. Part of the three-day workshop agenda was reserved for a round table discussion, an exchange of ideas on how to develop cutting edge and progressive cotton promotion. One strategy that everyone agreed was important to pursue was to work collaboratively with educational institutions, particularly those that have an interest in textiles and fashion. It was agreed that it is important to educate students about the benefits of cotton, not just because they are potential consumers, but also because they are the buyers, fashion executives, and product developers of tomorrow.
I am speaking to you today as the Executive Director of the IFCP, but also as the Professor who worked with the students on one exemplary program.
In February 2005, thirteen seniors in their final academic semester from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York took up the challenge to develop a line of cotton-based products for their senior project requirement. The team's primary project focus would be to research, design, manufacture and market in prototype form, a commercially viable line of denim jeans, which is a product category that they showed a passion for, a category that shows continuous market growth.
The group's secondary focus was to demonstrate how a domestically focused cotton promotion program could be developed at little or no cost, through collaboration between schools and industry. Promoting a cotton-based line of jeans makes sense for cotton producers because as you know, denim accounts for about 20% of worldwide cotton consumption. In other words, one out of every five bales of cotton sold is consumed by denim.
With the help of Cotton Incorporated, the creative staff of the IFCP website — and other industry professionals in the denim business that donated time and expertise — the project was a strong success, and this was the beginning of Cake Denim. Cake Denim is a line of moderate priced premium jeans for the 35-45 year old woman who has a difficult time finding jeans that fit.
The Cake Denim team chose a blend of U.S. and Australian upland cotton, had it spun into yarn in Thailand, and then had the yarn dyed, woven, and the fabric finished in China. The garments were constructed in Hong Kong, and then the specialty denim finishing techniques that the students designed, were applied in California.
What made this possible was having guidance from a company that already makes jeans, a patternmaker who works for many top jeans companies, an Art Director from a major U.S. consumer magazine, and Cotton Incorporated, including their wealth of consumer knowledge.
The students developed a marketing strategy based on solid research, and developed their overall image positioning and graphic design with guidance from the IFCP members and contributors. These contributors offered guidance, but made sure the students themselves did the work.
Cake Denim is very much a cotton story, from fiber content to consumer promotion. The product was built around fit, but the market development was built around the cotton consumer, cotton's properties, and readily available promotion tactics used by the cotton industry itself. In short, Cake Denim told a denim story, and in doing that, was able to tell a cotton story.
The project was professionally filmed and presented last September at the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC) 64th Plenary meeting in Liverpool where you may have seen the film, and in October at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York to about 500 top tier fashion industry executives, and has been presented many other places since that time. The project generated significant interest from all over the world, and through all the levels of the textile supply chain.
The Cake project satisfied the learning outcomes mentioned above. First, the project exposed a group of graduating seniors, who have now begun their careers in industry, to a real-life experience in developing textile-based products for consumer markets, aimed at retail.
Second, the project also taught them how to use cotton content as a marketing tool to help develop a successful market presence.
Third, and what I hope you will focus on today, is that the project demonstrates how you can develop programs like this with schools inexpensively, easily, and enjoyably in any country around the world, and how you can participate from any point in the supply chain.
This past spring, a new group of graduating seniors took up the project during their final semester, as will a group every spring going forward, and they made their own modifications. They changed the branding, the product, the fit, and the distribution strategy. They also expanded the line to add well-priced sweaters.
The new collection is called "fit by FIT", and "Fit Knits" for sweaters. A few members of the group stayed in New York over the summer to produce a film of their accomplishments. They produced a "Coming Soon" video trailer, which they asked me to show to you today. The film you are about to see is about 2 minutes in length, and is meant as a preview for you to see what will be coming in the not too distant future. After the film, I'll explain how to get started on a program like this, and will try to answer your questions about the process.
Because so much work had been done the year before, the group was able to move faster, and take the project further this year. Their goal was to bring the project to a point where they could make a comprehensive sales presentation to a major retailer before the end of the semester. They achieved that goal by presenting their work to world-famous Bloomingdale's, one day before graduation, and I'm happy to report a significant degree of interest from that retailer.
I mentioned earlier that this cotton promotion technique, specifically industry working with universities, is practical and effective in any country, and by companies or organizations from any point in the supply chain.
If you are based in a textile producing, consuming, or trading region, there are more than likely several textile and fashion schools in that region with extraordinarily talented students, and professors, like me, eager to embark on real time projects with you. As representatives of the cotton and textile industries, you can sponsor these projects, and provide guidance, by allowing students and their creativity to flourish. The Bremen Cotton Exchange at their 28th International Cotton Conference sponsored a fashion show, created by students from a local university, and it became part of their event. Cotton Incorporated sponsors contests for promotion ideas, including the film you just viewed. They also focus on point of life issues, for example identifying that when a young person goes away to college, it may be the first time they become aware of fiber contents, and thus become aware of cotton. And more and more private companies are sponsoring student design contests, with the award of having the collections produced, and returning a percentage of sales to the institution for scholarships.
But to be sure, in addition to your expertise, there are certain constraints and limitations to working within the academic schedule. Our semester, like many, is about 15 weeks long, and in that time period the students must research, design, and produce samples made around the world. There are no deadline extensions, and everything must be carefully planned out, or everything will be a rush. Without your commitment to working with them in a timely fashion, the project will fail. Schools also have rules, regulations, formalities, and bureaucracies.
And so why would you want to take my suggestion, and work with higher education on projects such as the one I am describing?
The advantage to the student is clear. They get to work on a project in real time, with pressures and deadlines, and it helps to provide a less traumatic transition into the work force. They are usually weeks away from their first full-time job in the industry. They make contacts, learn professionalism, and take responsibility for their work, and function at a high level of industry that would be unavailable to them otherwise.
The professor can't help but stay current with industry, and their knowledge of individual product business practices. It's very good for the professor.
The IFCP has an interest in working with schools, in that this is a way to demonstrate a domestically funded and domestically focused promotion technique that is inexpensive and useable all around the world. Our mission is to be a forum for cotton promotion idea exchange.
And of course, who in the cotton industry wouldn't want more exposure to future customers? The entire cotton industry clearly has an interest in seeing that the product developers all over the world have heard the cotton message from a time before they enter the workforce, and then throughout their career.
But what this will do for your company? How can you measure effectiveness of the efforts you put in, and how can you determine the value of these projects to your company? Giving back to your community, and the professional development of students, of course is a wonderful feeling, but there is more.
There are short-term benefits, and long-term tangible benefits for you. In the short term, companies get to observe potential employees, and watch their leadership skills develop, even under pressure, and decide who you want to hire, either now or later. You also get a spurt of creativity infused into your product development effort, and graduating seniors usually have some pretty good ideas. If you tie the project to an event and follow up properly, there is usually publicity to be gained. In addition, schools are usually well connected, which opens up a vast network to you. The long-term benefits are there also, and I will bring you back to the exact words I asked you in the beginning of our talk. "Imagine this scenario. You have the opportunity to meet with about 50 potential customers from all over the world every year, introduce yourself to them, get to know the way they think, listen to their concerns, and even influence the way they will do business. You have the ability to do that rather simply, and you have the ability to plant the seeds of a mutually productive relationship that can benefit you for years to come."
The IFCP believes that programs like this, and those like it, can be a major step forward in the effort to demonstrate that cotton promotion can be effective, attainable and affordable, and to demonstrate one additional way that you can work with the IFCP to move your programs forward. From an academic standpoint, we believe programs such as these are important to preparing graduates for the global industries they will enter.
The IFCP can work with you to facilitate these kinds of programs. Our CottonSponsor program is designed to facilitate projects like this and others, from first hand experience, and for very little cost. The way to get started is to identify a textile or fashion school that is local to your region. Contact the Chairperson the textile and fashion related departments, or the Research Department. Tell them that you would like to sponsor a project that delivers a benefit to you through fabric development, done by students, within the confines of their disciplines. If you would like the IFCP to help you facilitate this, go to the IFCP website www.cottonpromotion.org, look through the site, and download the application to be a CottonSponsor.
Thank you for your attention. I'm happy to take any questions about this project, or how we can help you get started with yours.