California Apparel News

As the minimum wage continues to rise in Los Angeles County and the rest of the state, more apparel manufacturers are opting to move production elsewhere.

That was seen in the overall employment numbers released in October that showed the number of people working in apparel factories declined by 2 percent over the same period last year, to 29,900.

But this seemed minuscule compared to the decline in 2017 when American Apparel shuttered its downtown Los Angeles factory and laid off 3,500 workers or when United Denim announced it was downsizing its blue-jeans factory and laying off 164 workers.

This year, the declines have been more of a trickle than a flood because most Los Angeles blue-jeans manufacturers had shifted their production to Mexico in the last few years. Now that the North American Free Trade Agreement is being revamped, U.S. clothing makers have more confidence in manufacturing in that bordering country, where garment shipments can be delivered to the United States in three days.

Several Los Angeles clothing companies have opened factories in Tijuana, Mexico, to take advantage of lower wages.

In Los Angeles, the minimum wage currently stands at $12 an hour for smaller businesses and $13.25 an hour for companies with 26 or more employees. On July 1, 2019, that goes up to $13.25 an hour for smaller businesses and $14.25 an hour for larger companies.

Lately, clothing manufacturers that want to do sustainable production close to home have been a boon for small factories that have low-minimum requirements for production, but large-scale producers are finding that to keep prices within the consumer’s grasp they often must look to producing overseas.

One relative newcomer to the scene is Los Angeles Apparel, launched two years ago by Dov Charney, who co-founded American Apparel, which filed for bankruptcy twice and whose brand name was sold to Gildan in Montreal.

Charney is making T-shirts, sweatshirts and other basics at his south L.A. factory, where he now employs 350 workers.

Still, Los Angeles County has the largest concentration of apparel workers in the United States and is the center of fashion ideas and designs. In New York City, the Associated Press estimated that by the middle of 2018 there were only 5,000 garment workers in Manhattan.

But the fashion industry is not just about the people making the clothes. Los Angeles is a huge design center for new concepts. According to a 2016 Los Angeles–area fashion-industry report profiled by CIT Commercial Services and the California Fashion Association, there are 4,130 fashion designers working in Los Angeles County. The industry profile noted there are as many as 200,000 jobs in Southern California related to the fashion industry when you count direct and indirect employment.