Hirdaramani Group, a leading clothing manufacturer with operations in Sri Lanka and overseas, created Hirdaramani Discovery Lab (HDL) in 2017 as a space to drive sustainable product innovation and design development. HDL is championing concepts such as circularity and upcycling and introducing new materials, new processes and finishes in collaboration with leading global clothing brands that share the Hirdaramani vision to build a better and more sustainable future. Theodore Gunasekara, Chief Executive Officer at Hirdaramani Industries and HDL, and Piyumi Perera, Head of Design at HDL and Hirdaramani Industries, share insights into a rapidly evolving industry and the many ways that HDL is influencing the future of clothing.

What are the trends shaping the future of the clothing industry?

If you look at the macro trends in the fashion industry in relation to what we do at HDL, the concept of circularity and sustainability are two of the biggest trends shaping the global apparel industry. We are committed to leading these trends by collaborating with institutions like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, re-looking at product life cycles beyond responsible manufacturing by paying attention to the product from the concept stage onwards.

Then, there is the hyper-digitisation trend where our design and development teams rapidly adapted to new design and communication technology to speed up co-creation with customers through the challenges in the past two years.

We are also looking at mass customisation (which refers to the combination of flexibility and personalisation of custom-made products with low unit costs of production) and how that will impact consumer choices and influence the future of clothing. So these are some of the trends shaping the global clothing industry which we are closely watching.

Can you briefly take us through the concept behind HDL?

What HDL is to Hirdaramani is what Phantom Works is to Boeing or what Skunk Works is to Lockheed. Any major company has an R&D unit. However, we set up HDL in 2017 initially as a collaborative unit where we can work with brands to explore new methods and techniques, different technologies, fabric types, washes and finishes to produce sustainable garments. PVH was a key brand to participate in this project in the early concept stage, but since then, many more of our customers have come on board after seeing the value of this process. The facility is accredited for several of our leading buyers including Levis and acts as the R&D hub where new ideas and thought processes come into being.

We have amalgamated the different aspects of garment manufacturing at Hirdaramani Industries under one roof. We collaborate with buyers on innovative designs, fabrics, clothing, technologies and processes and test their viability at HDL. For instance, we can design a virtual 3D garment on a bio-scanned model, tick all the prototyping boxes and then manufacture the actual commercial garment remarkably fast. We have state-of-the-art washing machines, ozone machines, laser devices and other equipment by which we will shape and conform the product to different client requirements in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner.

HDL provides many innovative solutions that our customers would otherwise not get anywhere else.

Sustainability is the central part of our ethos because all our manufacturing units are LEED certified. Our production facilities have rooftop solar, generating up to 17GW of electricity per annum. So when it comes to energy, we produce as much as we consume, which is also a selling point with our buyers.

How is HDL making a difference and influencing the industry to reimagine itself?

It is no secret that the apparel industry is second only to oil as the most polluting industry. Looking at product lifecycles from concept to end of life, we would like to reimagine a much cleaner clothing industry without compromising the fashion or functionality aspects that drive the industry.

One of the views that we were exposed to at the 2018 Hong Kong Sustainable Fashion Summit was that clothing manufacturers could eliminate 80% of all waste with better choices at the concept stage. And that is at the heart of what we do at HDL. We are reimagining the fashion industry by being more conscious of raw material and processing decisions at the initial stages of designing and developing a product. We are also continually eliminating unnecessary processes that have had a negative environmental impact while investing in cleaner technologies for better output. It is an ethos pervading across Hirdaramani that resonates deeply with our customers and end consumers.

We are challenging ourselves to do something completely different to achieve our objectives. Since Hirdaramani focuses on casual clothing, consider the example of the ubiquitous fivepocket denim to demonstrate what HDL does. The garment is sewn and washed, and that washing process is where most of the complexity comes in. A pair of jeans is virtually black when it completes the sewing stage and must go through a washing process with stones and various chemicals and enzymes – and there is a whole scraping process – depending on the degree of fade and the worn look a buyer wants. We also use different resins, tints and chemicals to further conform to buyer requirements: it may be traditional denim which is very rough or cutting edge where it is stretchable and form-fitting. At Discovery Lab, we are figuring out how to do all that with less water and chemicals than is conventional in Denim processing.

We now use foam and mist from nano sprays for washing instead of water and replaced volcanic pumice stones (used to cause abrasions in denim jeans) with synthetic stones. We eliminated labour-intensive scraping processes by investing in machines that use lasers to take off micro millimetres of indigo layers to expose the different shades of denim fabric. By using ozone to lighten the colour of denim, we have eliminated the pollution caused by traditional bleaching, where several kilos of treated bleaching agents end up in the environment as sludge. These are some initiatives to come out of HDL delivering cutting edge finishes and quick lead times. Global brands like Levi’s have requested us to use these options to conserve water and reduce the harmful impact on the environment. Hirdaramani continues to invest millions of dollars in HDL; to give it that edge to deliver specific advantages to attract and retain buyers to grow the business.

Colour is a huge factor in fashion. Bringing in colour can be done in two ways, either fabric is dyed at the mill or through a process called garment dyeing, and one of the challenges that we have is that some of these dyes pollute. We are looking more at mineral or plant-based dyes, and that is a challenge because there are colourfastness issues to adhere to, as consumer demands have not changed. However, as we always consider the environmental impact, these are the challenges we try to solve at HDL.

What HDL is to Hirdaramani is what Phantom Works is to Boeing or what Skunk Works is to Lockheed

We are working with some world-renowned chemical suppliers on non-chemical based dyes. One company collects leftover garments and scraps from production floors, extracts the colour and reintroduces it as dye back to manufacturers like us who can use it in garment dyeing. Fabric dyeing is a critical component of garment manufacturing and causes a lot of pollution. Several millions of yards of dyed fabric often go to waste. At Hirdaramani, we garment dye the exact quantity required by the customer, in eco-friendly dyes, making this a far more sustainable end-to-end process.

In terms of collaboration, we are collaborating with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation working on the Jeans Redesign Project to make jeans better for the future, bringing post-consumer waste back into the system and introducing cellulose-based materials to speed up decomposition and recycling.

There is one other fascinating development. The Hirdaramani Group has invested in Eco Spindles and has converted up to 10MT of plastic into yarn. We have partnered with them to produce jeans that have 11% ocean plastics with complete traceability of origin. We are working on developing this for commercial production with the Ahlers Group, a leading apparel group in Germany that owns the Pioneer denim brand. This is a step towards locally sourced, traceable raw materials.

What is your strategy to grow HDL and align the other units of Hirdaramani to take HDL’s innovations and initiatives forward into the mainstream?

Hirdaramani Industries consist of 11 facilities in Sri Lanka, seven of which are manufacturing plants, two washing plants, one storage unit and HDL. HDL comes under the Hirdaramani Industries umbrella and is the design development, concept hub, and growth enabler of Hirdaramani Industries.

Most of our buyers share our core values on sustainability. They want to produce garments in the most eco-friendly manner because they are highly reputed in their respective markets and genuinely yearn to protect the environment for future generations. We collaborate with their design teams from the ideation stage onward.

Our approach to growth is twofold. One is to go with our existing buyers and grow the business with them because we have the partnerships, understanding and mutual respect, enabling us to take things forward. Our business is primarily casual wear, but now with some of our buyers, we have expanded our range with new products such as loungewear, swimwear and outerwear. So, that is another growth option with our existing clientele.

The second approach is to work with other buyers because they offer something very different. If we take a buyer like Patagonia, they are known for their sustainability initiatives. For instance, they ask people not to buy their clothes but send them damaged clothing that they will restore for reuse. We are working with them to produce garments from hemp, an extract from the cannabis plant, in place of cotton, and this again is something different and diverse, creating a unique selling point for us.

Hirdaramani Industries has grown about 60-70% over the last couple of years, and the contribution from HDL is significant despite market prices for apparel products steadily declining. While margin pressures may never dissipate, thanks to HDL, we can make garments using less fabric in a shorter time, with fewer chemicals, less water and fewer pumice stones. All those combined allow us to maintain margins and remain competitive, even though Sri Lanka is fast losing its labour cost-arbitrage.

Certain high-value products generate better margins, offsetting any margin degradations from our mass-market products. When it comes to pricing, we have a conversation with our customers because we want sustainability but do not want prices to increase; and that is where the investments in technology have helped to do things faster and better. But we have also had buyers like Patagonia who value what we do and are willing to pay a premium. We can start targeting high margin, high-value businesses. At the same time, we do not want to lose our price focus because ceasing to be lean can be facile.

Our strategy is primarily to offer value to our customers – a better product, better prices, better competitiveness. We know through experience that ‘better for the planet’ doesn’t have to mean ‘bad for the bottom line’ and we are keen to continue to promote this concept to our customers at all levels.