Inside a Portuguese Clothing Factory

Glass factory.

This is a knitting mill. After, we're going to a dyeing facility, and finally, we're finishing at cutting and sewing. I'm with Helder, the founder of Pure Cotton, producing for some of the most luxury fashion houses in the world, and we're going to show you how the most beautiful products are made from start to finish. Let's go!

Let's have fun!

I want to work in a really different way. You see the atmosphere here. This doesn't seem like a factory. Maybe other companies are more productive than me.

Most probably, yes.

But the ambiance, the atmosphere for me is the key. I want to be able to enjoy life with my customers, with my people that work with me. For me, this is the most important thing.

So here is all the machines. As you can see, all of them are like separated from each other to not have contamination.

So can you explain what you mean by contamination?

When you start to do a fabric, you see that the cotton that is in the air, if it's connected, the cotton will go on the machine and goes inside of the fabric. And after, when you dye it, you'll see black spots or white spots.

Very important to keep it separate.

As you can see here, there is different kind of machines. So this, for example, is like a jersey machine that is doing stripes. And open fabric. We guarantee that all the fabrics can be used. Otherwise, you can create like a break in the fabric in the middle.

This specific one is a striping machine because it cuts every single time there's a color change, and they can essentially program it to determine when it cuts. So if you want to have a lot of small stripes or you want to have a really fat stripe, whatever it is, the machine can be programmed.

Exactly.

So I noticed that on the inside there's like an invisible light.

This UV light is to detect defects. It will detect the defect and the machine will stop.

So it's detecting any flaws in the fabric, essentially.

Here is the board of productivity, defect rate, etc. So basically here you can see everything that is going on.

This is like an internal system that they built just for their product. Okay, and here you see the "defetto," I guess that's defects, and "turno" is the shift. So it's defect to shift ratio. Okay.

The first shift have a lot more defect than the third shift. On the first shift, normally is less productive because because it's on the first shift that everybody change the machine, so it's normal that you produce less. Then you give for the third shift for the mass production.

Right. So this is pretty cool. When you take a circular knitting machine, you open it up, you can see the guts of what's going on.

This comes in a tube, but it's open. So this machine was adapted to be open, that in the end you don't have again the, the wrinkles. So the future of this industry is that all the machines who have this, uh, like adjustment, because More and more we believe that is the only way of less defects and less productive because this takes longer, but in the end the product will be better.

What's going on right here is the tubular fabric is coming down, it's coming down as a tube, and then usually in cutting is when they would open up the tube. But in this case, the machine is a blade right here that's actually cutting the fabric, and then that fabric is separated And it's then rolled up as an open fabric that's been cut.

This fabric on this side, this is a very light fabric.

You don't see the wrinkle.

If it was a more like compact fabric, you see here like a wrinkle. So when you have the fabric layering on the cutting machine, right? If you see this, you cannot cut a garment there because if it's on the sleeve, on the front, you see like breaking the fabric. Since the fabric is already open, you don't have this problem. Every fabric will be homogeneous in the all length. Otherwise you can have this kind of—

Right, because if you cut it with a machine afterwards, sometimes it's not exact.

Exactly.

But this is as exact as it can get because it's literally doing it during the process with the same amount of tension then and there. Yeah, I see. So that's why you say it's the future.

Yeah.

This is incredibly subtle. No client would ever know about this. You probably speak to people even at luxury brands, they have no idea this is going on.

But very, very important detail that whoever's handling your production should certainly know about because you don't want to get a t-shirt back that's going to have a wrinkle down the center, or you don't want to waste way more fabric, 15 to 20% more, which is going to cost you 15 to 20% more because fabric is the most expensive part of making any garment. So these little things that they're able to kink out early on in the process and have knowledge about, it's a game changer.

How do you balance working this hard and playing that hard?

We are the love generation.

So I believe in the motto, work hard, play harder.

That's it.

I see a lot on my traveling, on the nightlife. Everything inspires me and makes me see new things to insert in the house brand.

What even inspired you to get into this business in the first place? Because it's really not a business that's for everyone.

No, at all. So my father in the '90s had a knitting factory that was very big here in Portugal, and, uh, basically I was born inside of a knitting machine. Pure Cotton started in 2011. Me and two other guys, one Portuguese and one Danish, that were both my clients, decided to join together and do a company that that we call Pure Cotton.

You've come a very long way, and now you're making garments at an extremely high level. Just looking around this showroom, there's not only complex pieces that are beautiful fabrics, but there's a wide variety of them. How did you get to a point where you became an expert in all these products?

When we started in 2011, it's funny that I wanted to only do t-shirts. That was my goal, just doing t-shirts. Because t-shirt is the easiest part. After we did mercerized cotton, after we start to do fleeces, hoodies, jackets, things start to evolve. At a certain point, I understood that a client wants to come to a place and do more things with them. We want to supply this, this offer to our customers. If this is different suppliers, it would be a nightmare for them.

Just to match the colors is already the first nightmare.

Yeah, so it's a one-stop shop for the customer. They can come and build their whole collection here.

Yes, of course. Yeah, and always it goes up and maintains there.

Okay, let's go.

These are some of the largest machines you will ever see in the production of clothing, and the reason why is because this is not garment dyeing. Garment dyeing is when you sew the product and then you send it to be dyed. This is piece dyeing. Piece dyeing is when you take the entire roll of fabric and you send it for dyeing. You need a really big-ass machine to do that. And these are the really big-ass machines that do it. The fabric is received here. Comes here off the truck. Into the warehouse. This is point A.

Okay.

Second step is prepare for the machines. They receive a shipment. It's 12 rolls of fabric. When they send it for dyeing in piece rolls, it's not just going to be one roll at a time. That would be very slow. And these are big-ass machines that have big-ass capacities. They can handle a lot of weight. So what they're doing is they're unspooling the fabric, which is the shape it needs to be in in order to go into dyeing. 'cause you're not gonna literally dye the entire roll. You are going to dye the fabric like this so that the color hits it more evenly. That's what this machine is doing. It's swaying back and forth. And then once they reach the end of the roll of fabric, what they're doing is they're sewing the next roll on at the beginning. So look here, he just reached the end of the roll and now he's gonna attach the next portion for the next roll. This is 2,000 kilos? Yes, 2,000 kilos. So remember, when you're talking about dyeing machines, it's not by roll, It's not by meter, it is by weight. And usually that metric for weight is in kilograms. So in this case, this huge machine here, this huge cylinder, 2,000 kilograms, 8 chambers, 8 areas you could put fabric in from that it can handle. So if you're dyeing a 450 GSM French terry, it can handle a lot less of it than if you're doing like a 180 GSM jersey for t-shirts, for example. And so that's what allows us to determine how much fabric can can go into the machine to get dyed. This is where the drying process begins. So there's a few things that are going to go on here. Number one, it's going to apply a certain level of tension to make sure the fabric is stretched out properly so that it's evenly dried everywhere. Secondly, the temperature is controlled so that it's dried evenly throughout the fabric. Since the tension was even throughout the fabric and it was being dried off in a very even way, when the fabric comes out, it's as if it's been ironed. The Fabric comes out of over there. Yeah, it comes to here. Finishing is done on this machine. And when we say finishing, we mean whatever final coatings need to go on top of the fabric in order for them to be finished. So over here, the fabric has had the softener applied to it. It's had whatever other parameters they want for finishing, be it an oil repellent, a water repellent, million different types of things. And the fabric is coming down here and it's being prepared for its final step where it's going to be taken to a QC This guy's looking out for any flaws in the fabric and prepared to stop the machine at any time if need be. And if it's all good, the fabric runs underneath and it starts being rolled. Once it achieves a certain weight, it'll stop, it gets cut, and it's done. So they're taking the roll of finished fabric and they're going to cut many different swatches to conduct many different tests. This is basically how they're able to create this very structured report to send to the customer.

So at the very base, you have a circular piece of fabric stamped in the standard GSM testing dimensions. The reason this is a circle is it's going to go on a scale that has exactly the shape They put it down and they're able to determine that in this case, this fabric comes in at a weight of 180 grams per square meter. Somewhere later down the line, over here in this fabric report, they have these swatches over here. These swatches are used for all the various different tests that they're going to do with those various different machines. The types of tests can be an acid test, an alkaline test, water test, washing test.

And what's, uh, saliva? Saliva attacks.

Okay, cool.

For the children. For the children.

This is an abrasion pilling tester. So what it's doing is it's using a pressure gun to basically go down and do this motion, in this case 500 times, it's written over here.

Once it's gone through that machine, it comes over here to be graded, and that's where they give it a certain grade level.

The customer is probably looking for a certain grade and that's how they can confirm whether it meets it or not.

Portugal is, I think, one of the most well-prepared countries for traceability and sustainability. Here you need to follow the rules. You cannot avoid rules, understand?

It's impossible.

In terms of sustainability, we take it seriously. We don't fool around. You'll never find, as it was found, I think, in India or Turkey, tons of fake organic cotton. This is impossible.

This is all of the waste from all the cutting. You can see scraps here. What they're starting to do is separating it by color. For the whites, it's the most ideal because you can actually dye this fabric in any color you want.

Basically, the idea is to separate all our waste of 100% cotton and do a yarn that will be 60% organic cotton, 40% pure cotton left.

Overs our waist.

So in the end, we'll have the Off-White that will be good for dye any color, and we also have the Mélange. Basically, that pink that you saw, we'll mix with other pinks from other clients or other productions, and we'll do a Mélange pink, and so on, so on, so on. Here they are cutting like a jacquard, so basically also it's made to match.

So when you say it's made to match, you mean that every single panel on the garment is going to align perfectly.

Yeah, so if there's a pocket, the pockets, the, the front placket, everything needs to match. And it's made that all the garments are looking the same. More and more this is becoming a trend that you can have all-over prints looking the same. So basically it's all-over print but cut in position way. So you have always a sleeve here, always the front here.

It's very demanding.

We have a lot of more work preparing because the pattern maker need works together with the graphic designer that we translate the pattern to the graphic design and we assemble all the parts.

I see, so sometimes you'll scale the design ever so slightly to make a huge difference in consumption.

Exactly, exactly.

So in the end, because when we cut like randomly, we don't use all the fabric, we can lose like 5%, not more.

It's amazing. Yeah, great. Yeah, it's 5% is record for something like this.

Here is like the, the core of the company, right? So in this sector is where we do prototypes, samples, and some PPS because we try to do the pre-production samples in production and not in the samples department. These people are our most those skilled seamstresses, they can do a wedding dress if necessary. So they do basically everything, everything that you see lying here, even here. So you have here a woven shirt made by them, at the same time a swim short, paddle tennis skirt. So you can see several kind of things made by the, the same people.

So this may not seem like a big deal. You might just think, well, it's sewing, sewing is sewing.

But actually it's a huge deal, and here's why. First of all, on this alone, there's like 3 or 4 different fabrics, but the key thing to note is that when you're sewing a fabric like this that has spandex in it, any tension on the machine is going to greatly affect how the sewing comes out.

Very, very different than sewing a woven fabric like this that's a lot heavier. Very different than sewing a swim short made of nylon.

So It definitely shows the skill that the seamstresses have.

All of the people here can sew in any type of machine, right? They are super skilled, so in the end they can do for the chain stitching, the wherever you think they can, can do this kind of operations.

We can see in several steps, for example, when you send to print and returns, we can see when they start to stitch.

And before going to iron, we QC.

And after ironing, we do another round to see if everything is okay.

This is the most important thing. If you control what we send to the customers is the key.

The quality we cannot compromise. The quality needs to be always flawless.

Of course.

Factories are closing in Portugal left and right. They have been for the last few years. What are your thoughts on this and what do you think the future holds for Portugal?

We had a perfect storm. So we have the year 2020-21, that was the best year for most of the companies who was doing like more jersey goods, like t-shirts, hoodies, whatever, because of the pandemic. Everybody bought way too much because it was selling. After we have the war, the price of the gas, the energy went up. Clients had to move from Portugal to Turkey or to Bangladesh or to China or wherever. Besides that, we have the interest rate also going up, the consumer drops, and of course we are in the middle of the perfect storm. This will continue. And for us as a company, basically we need to find other clients. In the end, there is no magic solution. The idea is to find new customers.

You have to be adaptable. Be willing to take on a new clientele.

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly.

What is something, as a factory owner, somebody who works in production, who understands the root of the product, what is a piece of advice you would give to all these brands?

You need to be humble and you need to work hard. You need to really work hard. You need to keep on pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. Things will happen. You cannot give up. You need to be very good at what you do, okay?

You need to try to be the best and never give up.