For the past year, Winnipeg was revelling in the reflected glitter of tabloid celebrity. After all, this was where Victoria Beckham, the Spice Girl fashionista, had chosen to have her $250 to $300 jeans produced.
Now, the air has been let out of the balloon. Western Glove Works, the 86-year-old firm that had won the coveted Victoria Beckham jeans contract for its Winnipeg plant, has announced it is shifting this production to Asia, signalling the end of all garment making in its local factory.
For a moment, Ms. Beckham had brought a measure of star power to Winnipeg's downtrodden needle trade, which had suffered huge job losses in recent decades – most dramatically at Western Glove Works, whose work force had fallen to 225 from 1,200 in the past five years alone.
But in the end, even a jet-setting Posh Spice was no match for the global forces battering Canadian manufacturing, led by a rising Canadian dollar and the severe labour squeeze in the hot national economy.
“You get hit with two punches at once and you can't remember which one knocked you out,” said Western Glove Works president Bob Silver, whose family company will shed 100 jobs involved in making Ms. Beckham's jeans under the dVb brand she has built around herself and soccer superstar husband David.
There's more beyond the profit squeeze he says forced him to subcontract the line. Mr. Silver insists the writing is on the wall for the entire Canadian industry if it cannot maintain the support industries for a viable garment trade.
“Twenty years ago I had people walking in every day trying to sell me buttons and threads and fabrics,” Mr. Silver said. “Today there is nobody to walk in the door.”
With the final remnants of its manufacturing shifting to Asia, Western Glove Works will maintain logistics, distribution, marketing and design operations in Winnipeg.
But by March, the work force will be down to 125 people, a number that Mr. Silver insists he should be able to protect from further ravages.
Pwered by sales of its Silver and 1921 brands – as well as contract production that includes the high-end dVb work – the company's annual revenue has grown to $100-million, Mr. Silver confirmed.
In the end, perhaps appropriately, it was Ms. Beckham's ruthless pursuit of style that may have doomed the Winnipeg production unit. In recent months, there has been a shift in fashion that required even more aggressive prewashing of the high-end jeans.
This is a highly technical process that involves stone-washing or sand-blasting the jeans with chemical solutions. It's known in the trade as laundering or wet processing.
Western Glove Works once had an ample supply of workers who were well versed in this art. When it approached 25 to 30 people whom it had previously laid off, they spurned the offer to return to their former employer.
“When you go back into a tight job marketplace, people ask how long you think this job will last and you tend to be honest.”
When the skilled laundering workers wouldn't come back, that was the final straw, he said. At that point, production in Winnipeg was not only unprofitable, but “it couldn't be efficient because of not having the right staffing.”
