My New Balance® for J.Crew 1400 sneakers are made in USA and available at a Liquor Store

My new pair of New Balance sneakers were color designed by the J. Crew design team, made in the USA and are available at a Liquor Store? Yes, indeed. This past week as I left  a meeting in Tribeca, I found myself in front of a Liquor Store, well not any liquor store but J. Crew Tribeca Men’s Shop. The store unique name “Liquor Store J Crew Mens Shop” comes from the fact that the store took over a location that used to be a liquor store bar, and now it has been reincarnated into a great & eclectic shopping experience for gentlemen.

Once inside the store, I found a great range of colors of the New Balance® for J.Crew 1400 sneakers; to my pleasant surprise, these colors are not only limited editions being offered by J. Crew but “each pair is crafted in the USA from premium American-made suede at New Balance’s Skowhegan, Maine, factory.” What a great example of innovation in both retail and sourcing while helping improve the US economy by keeping jobs in America.

New Balance® for J.Crew 1400 sneakers

The irony of this shopping experience for me, was that just this past July I attended a seminar on the “Innovation of Sourcing” for the textile and apparel industries, during a fairly known fabric & sourcing trade show in NY. What this seminar called innovation meant going after the cheapest labor in the globe; is that really innovation? The panel was composed by 2 industry veterans, a young technology savvy entrepreneur and a not so good moderator. The speakers except for the technology savvy one, concentrated the best part of the conversation talking about the importance of knowing your factories and visiting the factories to make sure you know and understand your suppliers; very good points but at the end they strictly spoke about doing business in factories in China and moving into Vietnam and Bangladesh looking for cheaper and cheaper labor. I truly walked away extremely disappointed with the panelists, except with the young technology savvy entrepreneur, and that’s because the technology on his site is actually innovative but at the end it revolved around imports.

One only needs to read into the labor shortages and increase labor cost in the far east to realize that future real innovation is closer to home. In addition, the US is one of the main cotton producers in the world but most of the cotton goes overseas and travels from country to country, where the yarns, fabrics and apparel are being manufactured before the garments end up back in our retail shops. How many miles does a pound of cotton has to travel around the globe before it gets back to a local retail shop? During a separate research, I found that today there are so many great innovation in machinery for manufacturing that requires a lot less manual labor and instead few smart trained operators; with adequate smart investment a company could increase productivity tremendously and compound it with lower logistics cost associated with domestic operations to help manufacturers balance out higher operations costs. That would be real “innovation in Sourcing”.

In the mean time, our politicians are all wasting time fighting about how to either cut expenses or increase taxes, but how about increasing domestic manufacturing and job opportunities? At the end, such idealistic proposal could only succeed when proper information is forwarded to the consumer. Give the consumers the choice to buy cheap products coming from half a world away or pay more for locally made products that can help grow local economies. I certainly know what to choose. Kudos to New Balance for their commitment to manufacture domestically. Click here to learn about New Balance Made in USA and Made in UK stance.

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Write the Future #Nike #Sustainable #design for #worldcup #in

As the World Cup gets set to start I’m most impressed by Nike’s work behind the scenes rather by the now famous 3 minute commercial that went viral before it was even public and has been seen over 12 million times in less than a month.

American’s alone consume approximately 200 billion gallons of water. On top of that, each year more than 10 billion plastic water bottles end up as garbage in landfills. As the US and World population increases, the demands on our water resources continue to increase. This puts a strain on our environment but there is a way to make a difference and Nike is working on it. For the first time, all of Nike’s national teams, including Brazil, England, United States, Portugal and The Netherlands, will be wearing jerseys made entirely from recycled polyester.

Nike’s bottles-to-T-shirts operation is fairly straightforward. Bottles were collected from Taiwanese and Japanese landfills; a Taiwanese supplier cuts up, melts, and spins plastic bottles into a yarn for the shirts. Each shirt consists of 100% recycled polyester and approximately eight plastic bottles. The shirts are slightly more expensive to produce than standard jerseys, but Nike claims that the costs ultimately even out because less material is needed for production.

Environmentally savvy soccer lovers will also have the chance to check out Nike’s shirts, the brand is using 13 million plastic bottles to produce jerseys for fans. All in all, Nike’s initiative will stop 254,000 kg of polyester waste from being dumped in landfills. This amount would be enough to cover more than 29 football pitches. If the recycled bottles used to make the jerseys were laid end-to-end they would cover more than 3,000 kilometers, which is more than the entire coastline of South Africa. For Nike, using the recycled plastic isn’t just a nice gesture to the environment; It takes 30 percent less energy to produce these eco-friendly shirts than with traditional materials.

After all, I guess the famous video is right in more ways than one, Nike is writing the future, a Sustainable and social responsible future that is.

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