It's well known that life has changed since COVID. Everything became a little more difficult. A trip to the restaurant now involves a lot of red tape depending on whether it's during the week or at the weekend, travelling has become a never-ending search, gathering documents for both sides, signing papers that never end and watching people stay on the ground.
Industry has also changed a lot.
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Over the last year and a half, we've found it extremely difficult to get access to our work tools. We're not just talking about clothes to personalise, but all the consumables you need to print T-shirts or do embroidery. Something as simple as a roll of interlining to finish the embroidery is now a huge problem with phone calls to various suppliers, stock reservations, price increases and quality decreases.
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The same is true of screen printing inks, which have risen considerably in price in recent months, sometimes causing brands to run out of stock because... there's no plastic for the packaging. Textile labels for clothes or personalised patches are not easy to produce now because of a lack of raw materials.
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But the worst part is undoubtedly the printing clothes. There are desperate days.
To give you an idea, not long ago we had to order from 5 different suppliers (from 3 different countries) to complete an order for 50 personalised T-shirts. In terms of postage and logistics alone, it's become a huge problem.
Getting stock to fulfil orders has become a full-time job since the start of the COVID pandemic.
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Cotton prices have risen considerably. Container prices to get goods to Europe have already doubled and are doubling again. This creates a huge problem in that the clothes are more expensive to produce and are not available on the market because there is no way of bringing them to Europe.
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And wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to produce clothes made in Portugal or Europe? No, far from it. We would continue to see stock shortages (because the raw material would continue to come from Asia - we don't have cotton production in Europe) and prices would double/triple anyway because labour is considerably more expensive.
The textile industry is facing the same difficulties as all the others. The print shops want to work but don't have the resources to do so. T-shirt printing prices continue to rise, as does the cost of producing any kind of personalised clothing.
Normal? We no longer know what that is, but there is talk of summer 2022.
What we do know is that the prices that have gone up (twice already in the case of clothing decoration) will not go down again.
