As the mass-market apparel sector moves to a demand-focused, agile supply model and labor costs increase, automation will play an important role in increasing labor efficiency, throughput, and flexibility.
Automation will be crucial to increasing the financial viability of on-demand near and onshoring models. To date, however, the apparel industry is lagging other sectors when it comes to automation. For example, in automotive, the most automated sector, about seven times more industrial robots are installed than in apparel; in the electronics industry, it is about four times more. Whereas some garment manufacturers have started investing in automation, neither automation nor advanced manufacturing have been a priority for the buyers at mass-market apparel brands and retailers for several reasons.
One reason is that apparel buyers have relied on relatively low labor costs in the core Asian sourcing markets and are now relying on the move to newer low-cost sourcing markets. Programs supported by apparel brands and retailers with manufacturers have instead focused on more traditional efficiency improvements following lean techniques as well as on compliance and sustainability measures.
Another reason is the technical challenges generated by automation, especially in the sewing process, as fabrics have proven difficult for robots to handle. Only in recent years have solutions for full automation in sewing selected fabrics become market ready, while semi-automation has found some application in factories around the world.
Also, fragmentation of the industry has hampered investment in automation technologies. As on-demand apparel production gains importance and automation technologies develop, the promise of automation is becoming more relevant for US and European mass-market apparel players, especially in near- and onshoring. In the following, we will evaluate this promise in more detail.
