California Apparel News

Los Angeles–based Guess? Inc. is strengthening its commitment to e-commerce. The company has recently expanded its online retail presence through a venture with Seattle-based Mercent, whose Mercent Commerce System data-exchange application facilitates transactions between Guess’ e-commerce system and Amazon.com’s platform provider.

Guess has its own sales engine at www.guess.com and has already been doing business on Amazon, but the alliance with Mercent lands the company in nine other portals, including AOL InStore, MSN Shopping, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, PriceGrabber.com and MySimon.

“Their existing technology wasn’t serving its purpose,” said Eric Best, chief executive of Mercent, which launched earlier this year and now counts Lucky Brand Dungarees and The Wet Seal Inc. among its clients. “For Guess, the ongoing costs to operate went down [using Mercent].”

The Mercent Commerce System facilitates the automated scheduled exchange of product, order, inventory, fulfillment and settlement data between Guess’ data center and the Web services–based interfaces of consumer marketplaces.

It is basically “an install it and forget about it” system, Best said. For Guess, it does not pay to build a direct interface with Amazon when Mercent can do it and add another nine resources, he added.

Guess Chief Executive Officer Paul Marciano agreed. “We selected Mercent for their ability to rapidly expand our online sales efforts through Amazon.com and other leading shopping portals,” he said.

Company-owned Web ventures are important, but more online shoppers are using multiple- resource sites to reach a broader spectrum of stores, Best said. Mercent’s vendor base has a consumer base of more than 100 million shoppers.

“Retailers that are using e-commerce are now looking beyond their own sites and at the millions of online shoppers that frequent marketplaces such as Amazon.com and Yahoo! Shopping and wondering how they can expand brand and product visibility through these channels,” said Rob Garf, senior analyst for AMR Research, an independent research company based in Boston.

Mercent, founded by former Amazon executives, has quickly built up a strong client base since its launch earlier this year. Crabtree & Evelyn, The Shane Co., Car Toys, Proflowers and Fortunoff are among its customers.

Venture Provides Online Textile Trading

China’s apparel and textile federation has formed a joint venture with U.S.–based CNTextile LLC, which will provide online trading and training services to link U.S. apparel and textile representatives with Chinese factories.

The service is set to go online when quotas expire on Jan. 1, 2005.

The China National Textile and Apparel Council—the national federation of all textile, apparel and home textile industries in China—and its affiliate, China Textile Network Co. Ltd. (CNTEX), are part of the venture.

CNTextile, run by former Gerber Technology Inc. executive Warren Hartenstine, has an exclusive agreement to conduct U.S. sourcing with Chinese factories for appareland textile-related products made in China after Jan. 1, 2005.

The joint venture combines experienced executives in the U.S. fashion industry with the professional staff of CNTEX to transform the complex sourcing market into a one-stop, full-service “e-market” using stateof- the-art sourcing processes, according to Hartenstine.

With more than 50,000 companies, 300,000 factories and 15 million employees, the textile, apparel and home textile industry is the largest segment of China’s economy.

The joint venture and its e-market are designed to accelerate trade in the cotton, wool, silk, leaf-fiber textile, knitting, yarn-dyed weaving, dyeing/printing/finishing, home textile, industrial textile, apparel, chemical fiber and textile machinery industries.

“Our mission is to increase the velocity of textile, apparel and home furnishing trade between the U.S. and China while decreasing the complexity, risk and cost,” Hartenstine said. “Today, China supplies $2.5 billion in fashion products to the U.S. market, but observers generally agree that this figure will jump to $7.2 billion within months of the end of quotas. Given five-fold growth, there are distinct competitive advantages in our e-market that improve collaboration, lower costs and [identify] transparent processes. By partnering with the China Textile Federation, we have the tools to normalize and optimize the sourcing opportunities in China for U.S. partners, regardless of size or trade volume.”

Added Xia Lingman, China Textile Network Co. chairman of the board and publisher: “The textile, apparel and home textiles industry is China’s leader in employment, investment and growth opportunity. The CNTextiles joint venture provides a formal bridge for CNTEX to provide our members with training, technology and other services to improve our ability to compete in the global marketplace and to customize our capabilities to meet the specific needs of the market in the United States.”

For more information, contact Hartenstine at (410) 939-7135 or wrh@cntextile.com. Or contact Zhao Heming at (86)-10-85229100 or zhm@cntextile.com.

DigiFab Wins at SGIA

Los Angeles–based printing supplier Digi- Fab Systems won the Digital Printing and Imaging Association’s Product of the Year Award at the recent Specialty Graphic Imaging Association show in Minneapolis.

DigiFab entered a print created with its pretreated polyweave light fabric and its Evolution RIP (raster image processor) software.

DPI provided all contest entrants with an identical test image and side-by-side comparisons.

To determine the best image reproduction, the entries were tested for color gamut, image quality, gray-scale and blackand- white aspects, and fine detail.

DigiFab, located in the California Market Center, manufactures pre- and post-press digital-printing equipment, CAD and RIP software, and pretreated textiles.

New Talent at OptiTex

New York–based CAD/CAM developer OptiTex USA Inc. has expanded its headquarters and appointed Bernardo Tubbs to its North American sales and support position.

Tubbs will manage all aspects of product demonstrations, customer training and customer support through the company’s new customer-relations management and Opti- Care support programs.

He previously held positions with Tony Suits and Sunpath Products and has experience in pattern-making, made-to-measure, product development, design, training and post-sales support in apparel CAD/CAM software technologies.

OptiTex also expanded its New York office to accommodate a larger sales department and to offer bigger training classes and increased technical support.