How MAS makes disruptive innovation beautiful

Life’s challenges are due to compromises it forces on people. Compromises cut across financial, lifestyle and other choices in every area of life, imaginable. At a more superficial level everyday purchase of food, clothing and other services are all full of choices forcing one compromise or another. Global apparel manufacturing giant MAS approaches product innovation as an initiative to eliminate compromises for the ultimate buyer of the product.

If one word could describe the job brief for MAS’s Nathan Sivagananathan it would be, innovation. Sivagananathan has made a career out of figuring how to eliminate one compromise or another in one segment of clothing – lingerie.

Over the years MAS has made many leaps but two of them broadly standout for the learning experience firm-wide. The first was its setting up of ‘Silueta’ a facility that makes laminated foam moulded bra cups now considered one of the best in the region. The compromise they attempted to address was the comfort that is often a trade-off with function in a bra.

A second innovative leap came from technology the firm acquired – the prototypes for which Sivagananathan rolled up and stuffed in to his trouser pockets – to unveil at an important client meeting over dinner. The technology had the potential to make it possible to put together lingerie without using any elastic. Sivagananathan had in his pockets rolled up prototype women’s briefs which MAS Chairman Mahesh Amalean showed their client over dinner at a posh restaurant where Sivagananathan was also present.

“We were out at dinner and passing around underwear” Sivagananathan recalls the evening. “The reason we invested was one of those at the table saying, “it’s an investment, it’s a risk and if not anything else, you’ll learn a lot from it.” Sure enough the learning curve in trying to commercialize the technology they had just purchased was steep. “We learnt so much from this and we have now managed to take it to a different degree.” The patent MAS acquired by virtue of having the technology makes it possible to infuse silicon
“This fabric has silicon and the technology we have allows us to then put a layer on top of it to make it softer,” he says showing a brief for females. “Normally in underwear you have elastic, but there is none here. You don’t see the silicon, so it’s really the manner in which we put it in.” The compromise silicon infused underwear remove for women is; it eliminates the bulge under the tight clothes – like yoga pants – caused by elastic on briefs.

Over the last five years the technology has generated over half a billion dollars in sales for brands MAS supplies these elastic less and as a result stitch less women’s underwear. For MAS its generated revenue exceeding $100 million estimates Nathan. He says MAS now have taken silicon technology across a broad segment of their products.

Because ‘stitches cause itches’, it’s easy to convince consumers to switch to stitch-less apparel provided buyers don’t have to compromise on cost. However not all MAS innovation is as disruptive as has been silicon infused underwear. Some innovation initiatives merely sustain while slightly more ambitious ones help transform aspects of the MAS business.

At MAS it’s the designers that stand between the transformative and disruptive innovation and customers who purchase these products at the end of the value chain. Designers, at the most fundamental level, help people deal with change by making products more desirable by improving the way they look.
Design is everyday business at most firms but few see it as an important function. Be it fashionable clothes, packaged consumer products or industrial goods; design –unconsciously – is everywhere. At businesses design exists at the subconscious level often because chief executives see it as an elite pursuit of artists or something only the handicrafts industry would bother about. Firms needing design help would hire an advertising agency or, as the case may be, an interior designer. This is because most companies live on design but don’t see it as an important function.

At a basic level it would be obvious why good design should matter to a company like MAS, Sri Lanka’s largest exporter of readymade clothes. Fashion sells apparel. However the world’s leading apparel manufacturers have built scale not merely by making trendy clothes. Consumers are demanding apparel that is original, environmentally sustainable, comfortable, and functional in various evolving ways and meets a whole variety of other specific needs.

At MAS designers and design minded executives are experimenting. “In the last five years technology and design have really driven our business,” points out MAS’s Chief Growth Officer Nathan Sivagananathan about the Sri Lanka headquartered group with revenue topping $1.3 billion. Its design centers are located in the US, UK and Hong Kong so that its 70 designers are in the same markets as its customers.
To understand MAS it’s important to recognize how far up the apparel manufacturing value chain it has gone since its inception a quarter century ago. Like other makers of readymade clothes MAS was initially focused on challenges around the supply chain and backward integration. Some of those first breakthroughs came with the supply chain. MAS’s apparel solutions are built on breakthrough thinking and been the fastest vendor on the road. In the last few years product lead-times to customers have been cut from 60-90 days to 10 days including design.

A focus on innovating at product, process, technology, cost and business model has led the breakthroughs over the last decade. MAS now has moved Sri Lanka away from a contract manufacturer to a design to delivery solution provider.

The sheer scale of MAS is difficult to ignore. Its 65,000 people – including those overseas – make it one of the island’s largest employers. Its factories are held out as models for lean manufacturing, supply chains are world class and productivity often the envy of competitors and clients.
So how does design fit in to this

To appreciate how crucial design is for MAS’s core business it’s important to understand its evolving role at the firm. In MAS’s core markets, the US and Europe, design plays an integral role in improving the quality of life. Firms serving international market can be hamstrung by the Sri Lankan design outlook which has so far been about drab products, poor quality and a general sense of apathy about how pathetic everything looks.

Even in a challenged economic environment design can be made to be relevant to the masses. Over the years some designers like Sri Lanka’s top architects, performance artistes and visual artists have helped shape the design aspirations of entire generations. Sri Lanka’s structured education system is too rigid to allow for much creativity. But as education reforms allow for students to pursue more creative interests and design is considered a serious career option versus the frivolity with which it has been perceived in the past; talent should emerge. As relative prosperity in Sri Lanka lifts the pall of gloom from the cities; an appreciation for design may also blossom.

People will at first believe that design is about making things look beautiful. In a superficial way they will be right. However without the calming and inspiring effects of good design the economic and social change driven by a growing economy will become difficult to tolerate. After all who will beam at ghastly high risers, hideous new consumer products on supermarket shelves and cardboard box like public transporters?
At MAS design often gives a familiar form to products that disruptive innovation has altered fundamentally. More often designers help interpret how new technology should be presented; a mix of familiar form combined with a desirable new quality so they can be easily assimilated with life. “The longevity of the product has to come from design, the ability to keep reinventing it” Nathan points out.

“Design brings the seasonal orders and technology brings the core orders,” Sivagananathan who is also chief executive of the largest division within the group, MAS Intimates – MAS Design, which accounts for a fourth of the group’s turnover, says. He takes a lead role in managing MAS’s largest customer Victoria’s Secret.

He says there isn’t one approach to design and technology. Sometimes they design a product and then try to figure how to produce it. They also approach it the other way around; starting with the technology and bringing design in to the equation later. In global industries design is already center stage because of its role in making change acceptable. At innovation driven firms like MAS, at the core of the fashion industry, acceptable has to decidedly be beautiful.