Romania has been a major source of sports clothing and footwear in Eastern Europe throughout the 1990s, but its role has diminished in the last few years because many Romanian workers have left the country, seeking higher-paid jobs in Western Europe, especially after the European Union liberalized the issuance of visas to them in 2005. More than two million Romanians are currently living abroad, and those who have stayed home have demanded escalating wages from their employers.
Set up by two Italian entrepreneurs in 1991, the first Romanian manufacturer of technical sports apparel, Sonoma, has seen its workforce decline from a peak of 5,000 employees in 1999 to less than 2,000 lately. However, instead of transferring its production to China in massive ways, it has taken the ingenious initiative of hiring workers from China and Bangladesh.
In a precedent-setting program, its chief executive, Antonello Gamba, has hired 300 workers from various low-employment regions of China and, starting in January 2008, a group of 850 men from Bangladesh, to work at Sonoma’s factory in Bacau. The company provides them with room and board. Respecting their culture, it places doctors, foods and cooks at their disposal and gives them a salary above the contractual minimum that can be between four and six times what they would earn at home. They can save the money or send it to their families in Asia, in the same way as the Romanians who have migrated abroad.
This scheme allows Sonoma to keep its know-how in-house and to control the production to respond to the demand for more frequent new collections, repeats and flash orders. Delivery schedules are shortened because of Romania’s geographical proximity to major European markets and its new integration into the European Union. Out of a total production of about one million pieces sold by his commercial company, CDA, Gamba outsources only about 20,000 units in China, partly to stimulate competition with Sonoma. He has also started to work with a big producer in Madagascar. The group used for many years its own factory in Tunisia as an alternative source, but closed it in 2004, laying off 300 people, to consolidate everything under the same roof.
Sonoma specializes in the manufacture of highly technical outerwear for skiing, hiking and other outdoor sports on an OEM basis. It uses sophisticated techniques such as ultrasonic laser welding of fabrics to produce seamless garments with a technology called ZeroSeams, patented by CDA. It has a team of about 10 Romanian-educated designers and product managers at its office in Bucharest that works closely with the clients.
Sonoma and CDA belong to a holding company, called Circle, which also controls Sport Gear, an Italian firm that owns the Wild Roses brand of women’s outdoor clothing and has the license for the sports apparel line of Vuarnet. While Gamba takes care of all the production-related operations, the marketing is steered by the Erlacher brothers, who previously led Ellesse and then bought Chervo, the leading Italian brand of golf apparel. The Erlachers continue to have their garments made by Sonoma, as they had done with Ellesse.
Aside from Sport Gear, which uses its factory for its Vuarnet and Wild Roses collections, the main outside clients of Sonoma are various international sports brands.
More on this company and on many others, including those that are now producing for the local market, in the first exhaustive report on the sporting goods industry and on the booming sporting goods market in Romania. Compiled by SGI Europe and measuring nearly 150 pages, it is coming out later this month and can be ordered alone or together with the reports on all the other countries in Southeastern Europe.
