Meet the ‘crusader for Canadian garment manufacturing.’
How doing away with outsourcing altogether is paying off for clothing maker.
As a child, Kathy Cheng spent weekends and summer days sitting atop rolls on rolls of colourful fabric at her family’s clothing factory in Toronto’s east end. She played with her toys and colouring books, gazing at the seamstresses and fabric cutters working around her.
Today at 39, she is at the centre of it all in a different way: Kathy is now her father’s business partner as president of WS & Co. Ltd., and founder of its promotional apparel division, Redwood Classics. The company co-founded by Chak Cheng in 1988 is one of a few full-service garment manufacturers left in Canada.
The Chengs built and rebuilt amid mounting pressure from offshore competition. And despite their immigrant roots tracing back to Hong Kong and Asia’s clothing factories, WS & Co. has remained fiercely Canadian. So much so, that Kathy Cheng now calls herself a “crusader for Canadian garment manufacturing.”
“I’m so proud of my Chinese heritage, and so honoured to be Canadian,” said Cheng, who came to Canada from Hong Kong at the age of four, one year after her father arrived in 1978. “We’ve had so many opportunities to go offshore … but we chose not to. In our little way, we want to give back to the country that’s given us so much.”
Since its launch, WS & Co. estimates it has made enough zip polo sweatshirts for every Canadian to have one. In the past 27 years, its clients have included Roots, Polo Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, Holt Renfrew, Club Monaco and Hudson’s Bay Co. It now produces Todd Snyder’s designer collection for the U.S. athletic brand Champion, and is a domestic knitwear supplier for luxury brand Coach Inc.
Consumers are becoming more conscious of where their products come from after the Bangladesh factory collapse in 2013, Cheng said. U.S. and Canadian brands are also showing increasing interest in having a North American c o mponent to their sourcing strategy.
“It’s not just social, but also proximity,” she said. “There’s a niche in the marketplace for brands looking for locally made due to a number of reasons. One of them being quality but also the flexibility, the quick turnaround, the proximity, the cultural understanding.”
Cheng comes from a line of textile manufacturers. Her grandfather was a manufacturer in China. When her father first came to Canada, he worked as a fabric cutter by day, and delivered pizzas and waited tables at Chinese restaurants to make ends meet. Cheng’s mother worked as a seamstress.
“It wasn’t a luxurious upbringing, but I don’t regret any moment of it,” Cheng said. “I grew up understanding that money didn’t grow on trees.”
Eventually, her father and his siblings pooled their money and opened Wing Son Garments Ltd. It began with just five workers and 10 machines. By the 1990s, it grew to nearly 500 employees.
Their fortunes changed in the early 2000s, with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and its dominance for production offshoring. By 2008, when the recession hit, the garment maker had close to 200,000 square feet of facilities and had downsized to as few as 100 staff.
“Like most textile families, we were left with the decision: Do we retire or not? At that point, my aunt and uncle had both retired from the busi-
There’s a niche in the marketplace for brands looking for locally made
ness. It was just my dad holding on to this thing,” Cheng said.
In 2009, the company restruc - tured with 40 staff, moved to a smaller facility and rebranded as WS & Co. Cheng brought sales and marketing experience to complement her father’s textile experience — creating a niche line, Redwood Classics, for producing highend, made-in-Canada corporate apparel.
“When I founded Redwood Classics, we were probably the first supplier to be able to say, every single SKU in this (promotional apparel) catalogue is proudly made in Canada,” said Cheng, who was one of three Canadians named to the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women program for 2014.
“It’s a way for Canadian companies to show they’re loud and proud. Their branding comes with a tag that says ‘Made in Canada’ and on a product that’s of great quality. Why put your company’s branding on an inferior shirt?”
The rebuilding at WS & Co. appears to have paid off. Last year, the company expanded to a nearly 50,000-sq.-ft. plant from 30,000 sq. ft., with its staff of 100.
Despite some patriotic appetite for made-in Canada wear, Sandy Silva, fashion industry analyst for market research company NPD Group, contends operating costs will continue to be a challenge for Canadian garment manufacturers. Even U.S. manufacturers are able to scale and lower costs than Canadian manufacturers, she said.
“T he made-in- Canada approach is less important than fair market value,” Silva said.
“In a market where fast fashion and online shopping is gaining in Canada, it’s got to be tough to compete for made-in-Canada brands.”
Still, Redwood Classics has only made a dent in the promotional marketplace. It’s “just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. The division works with eight of the top 40 promotional wear distributors, whose combined sales are about US$1 billion in North America.
Cheng has helped WS & Co. innovate in another way: giving a voice and face to a Canadian manufacturer that was always behind the scenes. Her plan is to continue building the brand online and sharing their craftspeople’s stories. Redwood Classic’s latest lookbook featured the product developers, sewers and cutters that have worked for their factory for decades.
“I look at our family struggles, our humble beginnings — to building the factory to something big and then the demise of the domestic textile industry, and rebuilding into and creating a niche for domestic production,” Cheng said, adding that “success is not a goal and that’s big for me.”
“It’s a byproduct of our hard work and integrity, and not forgetting where we come from.”