Word: ties
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...Paul Cavey, a China analyst with Macquarie Research. "What's needed is only a turn in sentiment." But that's dependent upon factors such as an easing of China's inflation rate, not on China's success in track and field events. "It is a mistake to try to tie China's stock-market performance to the Olympics," says Donald Straszheim, chairman of the research firm Straszheim Global Advisors. So a few years from now, when punters are urging you to buy shares in the U.K. simply because London will be hosting the 2012 Summer Games, remind them what happened...
Domingo Ramirez is a cutter on the tie-factory floor. He unrolls silk fabric from a long bolt and smooths it out on the cutting table. Then he lays down a cardboard pattern, draws a chalk outline and cuts the material with a circular knife. Like cutters around the world, Ramirez does this a hundred times a day. But unlike almost all of them, he does it in the U.S.--in New York City, specifically, just a 15-minute car ride from the Madison Avenue headquarters of his employer, Brooks Brothers...
...counterintuitive to say the least. Back in 2001, when Claudio Del Vecchio, the son of an Italian eyeglasses magnate, was thinking about buying Brooks Brothers from the British retailer Marks & Spencer, the sales pitch included a familiar refrain: a new owner could close the Queens, N.Y., tie factory, move manufacturing overseas and save a ton of money. DelVecchio did buy the company, but he didn't close the factory. Instead, he plowed millions of dollars into improving it. Now every single Brooks tie, whether sold in Detroit, Milan or Dubai, starts there. "Of course we could go to China...
...list of advantages is the way Brooks manages its inventory. The company can put a new tie on the shelf, see how it sells and, if it's a runaway, make and ship more within days. At the factory, a tie starts at one end with a cutter like Ramirez and then works its way in a bundle of 50 down the football-field-size room. All 16 steps--including sewing the tie's blade to its tail, adding a lining, pressing the tip and turning the tie right side out--take about an hour. "The flexibility to reproduce something...
...fair to the legions of apparel manufacturers who have gone overseas, the economics of making a Brooks Brothers tie in the U.S. are far different from those of making, say, plain cotton underwear. About 70% of the cost of making a Brooks tie comes from materials (the company imports almost all its silk fabric from England and Italy), which leaves a fairly small fraction of the cost coming from labor. Compare that with making a Brooks shirt, for which the proportion is flipped--just 30% of the cost of production is from the material--and it's easy...