January 17 20
Added Value

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FAMILITEX’S FUTURE IS TECHNICAL, SUSTAINABLE AND SPORTY

The sustainable, technical and sports segments are the areas where Familitex is strategically investing, in order to keep growing and overturn the continuous erosion of the company’s margins.

“Our focus is not on quantity but on high-quality differentiated products. We don’t want to pay to work. We need profitability”, states Afonso Barbosa, 48, founder and CEO of the Barcelos-based company, which recently celebrated its 20th birthday.

“Fashion demands more sports, and sports demands more fashion”, explains the CEO of Familitex, whose knitwear production is organized into four traditional lines – fashion, premium, technical and sport, and sustainable – that mingle and intertwine each day more.

“We can’t raise our margins working for the big fast fashion groups. In order to increase margins we must make differentiated and technical products, with greater added value, for brands positioned in higher level markets, like Timberland, Tommy Hilfiger or Hugo Boss”, he states.

The Familitex group is made up of three companies, all of them based in Barcelos: weaving (which manufactures all sorts of circular knitwear, employs 90 people and closed the year with a business volume of 24 million euro), dyeing (the result of the purchase and restructuring of the former Luís Simões, which is undergoing a modernization plan – an investment of eight million euro), and Serkut (a warehouse that currently stocks two million euro in finished knitwear, and that closed last year with five million euro in sales).

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